Phenom... Quad core AMD...

[zanthor]

Anyone have one of these puppies running Quin boxing? 4 cores, but 2.3ghz instead of 3.0ghz... so I'm wondering if two more 2.3ghz cores make up for the difference... since I can RUN 5 boxes but my ventrilo shits the bed and sound pops and cracks like styrofoam I'm guessing that may push it over the edge and be a lot cheaper for me than upgrading mainboard/cpu/os reinstall for the Intel solution...

[Wilbur]

The Phenoms aren't brilliant, however if they are an upgrade over your X2, then go for it. You are losing 600MHz per core, so a decent cooler will be needed if you want to overclock it some. It'll handle more processes far smoother than your old chip. I'd recommend running your main on a seperate core that the other 4 instances of WoW don't have access to.

[Tonuss]

Are you talking about a drop-in replacement (ie, keep the motherboard and just replace the CPU)? If so, going from dual-core 3.0GHz to quad-core 2.3GHz could make your game play less jittery and much smoother. As I understand it, they have a version of the Phenom 2.3GHz that is unlocked, which allows you to change the multiplier. That can make for less troublesome overclocking since you're not changing the bus speeds (or not changing them as much).

[Crucial]

Currently using a Phenom 9600 quad (black version but haven't overclocked it) and running 4 instances on 1 machine (4 gigs ram, GeForce 8800 GTS). I wouldn't say its amazing but it definitely smooth enough for 4 - setting the affinity for each instance specifically worked best. Unfortunately my monitor situation is crappy since I have a single 19" lcd to work with at the moment. I've got a Geforce 7900 GTX sitting on the shelf which I'm wondering if I can take advantage of with another monitor to spread the crunching out a bit?