I'm saying you shouldn't pay for more speed than you'll use. An E8200 at stock speeds will have no problems chewing through whatever you throw at it - in my opinion. If you think you need more, then turn it up a little -- these Penryn dual cores seem to love the speed.
What my statements whittles down to is if pushing the CPU power has negligible benefits on games, and my system would have multiple programs and potentially a game running at one time, then a quad core is more beneficial for my case.
Yeah, I've found that I have a tough time noticing the difference between a Core 2 E6300 @ 1.86GHz and a Core 2 Quad @ 3.6 GHz in most games. Maybe all games. Hell, I have a hard time telling the difference between my Athlon 64 X2 and a Core 2 Quad in games. The load is mostly on the video card, unless you run 1024x768 or are running a Celeron D. The bulk of games out there will usually reside on 1 or 2 cores. I know of nothing that gets a noticeable improvement from more. SupCom and UT3 sorta hit a 3rd core, but I can't tell if it does anything for gameplay. Every CPU comparison I've seen showed that Quads don't bring returns with games.
On the other hand, with stuff like video encoding where I can peg all 4 cores, there is a very obvious difference. The problem is that it is very hard to find apps that do this. I've only managed to do it with said video encoding (x264, WMV, divx, or 2x xvid), 4x LAME MP3 encodings (lol), 2x 7zip instances... Another thing that comes up here is I/O performance: you will max out hard disks before the CPU. So you have to plan out accessing from one drive to another and not hitting each drive with more than one process...blah blah..
I doubt that a modeling app like Lightwave or 3DStudio would benefit much from a quad unless you are doing hours of final scene renders. For the modeling step, a Quadro GPU would probably be dramatically more beneficial. I've seen the lowest Quadros outperform SLI'ed 8800GTX cards in these apps. Quadro's are only something to look at if you are very serious about modeling, however. This is something I'd see a engineering firm investing in (I have some friends using this hardware).
I have a hard time seeing that multi-tasking various mostly-idle applications will ever push a quad core to any noticeable benefit. Maximizing I/O performance will make for a quicker system here, IMO.
Berek: I think you should invest in SSDs. Getting rid of HDD access times and horrible random access throughput almost completely will make for one hell of a snappy (if expensive) system. Or just least try to set things up so major apps aren't on the same HDDs.
Considering that Quads are approaching $200, the only disadvantage to them is power usage, IMO. Max overclock isn't going to be a big deal in the end. But they do almost use 2x the power because they are simply 2 dual cores on the same package.
but I can't argue with them... I use watercooling because it's been a carryover from my Northwood overclocking days. But I STRONGLY doubt that it's doing anything for my overclock now, with the notable exception of keeping temps even lower while also quiet.
