How much does a Quad Core improve Gaming Performance?

[cabernet]

My brother is gonna build his computer this summer and Im thinking about giving him my E6600 dual core intel processor to him for 90 bucks (its only been used for 9 months) and Im gonna use that money to chip in for a Q6600 (I built my computer 2 weeks before the Quad core's price drop and was to lazy to refund it) but I wanna know how much game performance does the Q6600 offer? Right now I got my E6600 an EVGA 8600GTS graphics card, 2gb of RAM running on vista so I guess you can consider that 1.5gb of ram. I wanna actually play games in DX10 (yknow since my graphics card lets me but for some reason isn't fit the handle the heat of DX 10 why'd they put it in???) like world in conflict with decently high settings and maybe a medium crysis... So does a quad core help that much?...

 

[hermeslyre]

Expect performance no more than a dual core at the same clock speed, unless the game is coded for the quad. Currently hardware is simply being built, software be damned. Which is to say games haven't caught up to a large number of cores, and aren't able to utilize them as of yet. This is hopefully going to change, and soon, but that's the way it stands now.

yknow since my graphics card lets me but for some reason isn't fit the handle the heat of DX 10 why'd they put it in???

Marketing, to make money. You have got to be wary when buying any type of computer component, manufactures can and will sell you a great product, but not before attempting to entice you with utter shite.

 

[Timo]

You won't notice much between games, perhaps it will give you one or two frames because now the background might (very little chance) run on the remaining cores (don't count on that for sure). But E6600 clocks quite high, as does the Q6600.

If you plan on doing some video-editing or photoshopping etc. I'd take the Q6600 though