Dual or quad core?

[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.