Quote: Original post by shiz98
From what I've read, GCC is only able to make minimal use of multiple cores as the bottleneck is IO bandwidth. It might end up being the case that a faster CPU will outperform a slower, multicore CPU, but this is just a guess.

I'm honestly surprised that compiling with GCC and watching a movie would cause the system to be a little unresponsive on a dual core - movies aren't generally that power-hungry (unless you're talking about HD). Even then, the responsiveness issue can be fixed with lowering GCC's task priority. Also keep in mind that the fact that a quad core is nice and responsive indicates that it's not being fully utilized.

Ja, you make a good point. Which begs the question of whether that extra cash would be better spent on a nice, fast RAID setup, to increase IO performance.

Quote: Original post by brandonman
oops, forgot to specify what I'm looking at:P
Intel
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103866

EDIT: hate html on these forums, wouldn't show a link for the AMD chip, so I had to just paste the url.

That Intel chip is quad core while AMD is dual.

Even in single/dual core usage places Q6600 will blow FX74. Especially if you overclock. Right now in my rig is E6400, and I clocked it from 2.14 to 2.8GHz without a change of voltage, HS/F or even thermal compound. It rocks.

If you program, then go for a Quad core, as programming is so much more fun when you can use REAL threads and not switching threads. (Watching how much CPU your thread for proccessing images uses)