Dual or quad core?

[Megablast]

Hi,
For the purpose of dual boxing, would you go for a dual or a quad core processor?

From what I hear, you would only use the quad to it's full potential running applications programmed for this specific type of processor.
WoW isn't programmed for quad so I'm curious why so many boxers prefer quad core cpu's. Am I missing something? :)

I apologise if this has been answered already, I couldn't find any clear information about it anywhere.

Thanks

[Shigan5]

With the quadcore, key clone has the ability to set the affinity of running wow on one of the cores, so youd set your main wow to core 1, 2 alt wows to core 2, 2 alt wows to core 3 and the last one youd save for other programs such as music or fraps or anything like that. Dual core youd have to spread the wows over two cores and also share those cores with any other programs. Now without third party software WoW will set its own affinitys to the first two cores and you'll be wasting the other two.

[Chorizotarian]

The Q6600 is selling for something like $250 at newegg. I doubt I'll ever buy another processor with < 4 cores.

[Gurblash]

My DualCore 1.6 laptop 5boxes just fine. For PvE its just fine, PvP on the otherhand will be pretty ugly I'd assume.

[Diamndzngunz]

I quadbox with a Daul core. Works just fine.

[Mudd]

From what I hear, you would only use the quad to it's full potential running applications programmed for this specific type of processor.
WoW isn't programmed for quad so I'm curious why so many boxers prefer quad core cpu's.

A program doesn't need to take advantage of dual/quad core for you to get a benefit from having multiple cores. If WoW was a single threaded program on 1 CPU and you had absolutely nothing else running on your machine then a 3 GHz single-core CPU would run the game at the same speed as a 3 GHz quad-core GPU, but you could run 4 times as many on the quad-core. Realistically there are hundreds of processes/threads running on your machine at the same time as WoW and the OS tries to balance the load of these threads over multiple cores. So the more cores you have the more things your computer can do at once and quite often this makes programs that need lots of CPU time faster because they get entire cores to themselves.

As far as dual/quad core for dual-boxing you would do fine with a dual.

[Sarduci]

From what I hear, you would only use the quad to it's full potential running applications programmed for this specific type of processor.
WoW isn't programmed for quad so I'm curious why so many boxers prefer quad core cpu's.

A program doesn't need to take advantage of dual/quad core for you to get a benefit from having multiple cores. If WoW was a single threaded program on 1 CPU and you had absolutely nothing else running on your machine then a 3 GHz single-core CPU would run the game at the same speed as a 3 GHz quad-core GPU, but you could run 4 times as many on the quad-core. Realistically there are hundreds of processes/threads running on your machine at the same time as WoW and the OS tries to balance the load of these threads over multiple cores. So the more cores you have the more things your computer can do at once and quite often this makes programs that need lots of CPU time faster because they get entire cores to themselves.

As far as dual/quad core for dual-boxing you would do fine with a dual.I'll agree with most of that. In Windows (or any modern OS) you can tie a process to a cpu (aka processor affinity). WoW may not need to run full out all of the time, but for example I can run 4 instances of Prime95 on my system and it'll run just as fast as any other 2.4ghz processor. Running 4 instances of Prime95 on a single or dual core system will make it stop working until you reboot.

WoW, by default, only will take advantage of CPU0 or CPU1. By manually setting the affinity you can run on any core on your system and only on that core. if it automatically ties itself to CPU0 and you have a ton of programs that only will run on CPU0 by default, having a multicore system will not help you at all.

[Taipan]

Greetings Megablast,

The latest range of Quads from Intel is getting into retail as we speak : Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550.

You may want to double-check incoming reviews -including O/C capabilities- and prices.

I've found that standard Quads -ie. not Extreme ones- really deliver more power than Dual for just everything : they just don't seem to get enough workload to beg for mercy.

I think I'll get the Q9550 and give my Q6600 to my dad who's still on a E6300 but enjoying the Call of Duty series now :D

/salute

PS : there's also words of a tuned-down Q9100 at 2.33ghz with slightly lesser performance than the current Q6600 2.4ghz but under USD 200.