Quote: "For anything but audio and video etc. the clock speeds have a far greater impact than the number of cores. It's also a much cheaper way to improve performance."
Read this please.
My laptop has a duel core 1.83 GHz processor. My old desktop has a 2.4 GHz single core. My duel core runs better than my single core, yet has a lower clock rate. You seem to be confused on the two. I'm going to be honest now, there is no way in hell that my AMD Athlon II X2 is going to be better and more efficient and powerful than my AMD Phenom II X6 coming in the mail. Sorry, it's just no possible. While not many games use multithreading yet, what are people going to be stuck with when many more games actually have it? A nice graphics card. While it's important to have both, I would rather have a higher end processor than a new graphics card. Your graphics card performance relies a lot on your processor itself.
I remember years ago, I was so hard pressed to get a new graphics card. I wanted to play GMod without lag, and I was nearly certain that a graphics card would make my problems much better. I had 2gb RAM (more than the game needed), and I had a faster processor than the minimum requirement, so I thought if I just cram a nicer card into my PC, I would easily be able to play. I was wrong. I upgraded my card to one with 246mb of memory (my integrated had 128), but I still didn't get the speeds I wanted. Was still laggy. So I installed more RAM (the second most idiotic thing people tell you to do to get better performance), still the same boat. A friend hooked me up with his old Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz. I plugged it in, my system flew. For those who don't know, the Pentium 4 HT was a single core processor that was hyperthreaded and act as a multi core one. The system ran great. I used it for 5 years until I got a new PC just this year.
People put too much pressure on one thing. You need to have a good combination of hardware to run smoothly. While you may have a nice graphics card, if your processor is basic and average, you're still only going to get slightly better performance.
Quote: "How on earth is quad core a thing of the past? My friend bought a hexacore, I told him he was a retard. Three months down the line he sold it and agreed that he was a retard - he's a heavy gamer and found it to be severe overkill, the 5th and 6th cores barely ever went above 10%."
So your friend sold it because it was too good?
I just now realized I've had a typo in my signature for the past 3 years.
