Hi folks,
In the next week or two (most likely just after Christmas) I'm hoping to upgrade my PC to something a bit quicker. At the moment I have an Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754) with 1GB Ram, a 320GB SATA hard drive and a 200GB SATA hard drive. Now I realise that I'm going to have to replace the memory, CPU and motherboard (I'm actually building these into a PC for a work colleague who wants a really cheap upgrade from a P3-800).
Traditionally I've been a fan of AMD chips, although I can't help but notice that the Core 2 chips seem to be doing much better than the Athlon X2 (and Phenom) chips are.
So I've kind of made my mind up on getting an Intel system. I was originally looking at either a Pentium Duo or a Core 2 Duo although due to having a bit extra cash to spend I'm thinking of maybe stumping up for a Core 2 Quad instead.
Thing is, is there any point in going for a quad core CPU?
I use Ubuntu Linux on my PC. My gaming is pretty much emulation based only (or older games like Quake, Doom etc). I want to do a bit of video encoding (home movies from DV to DVD) and other than that it will be mainly web browsing and e-mail and listening to a bit of music.
Would many of the emulators out there benefit from quad core CPU's over dual core?
I guess I'm thinking, would I be better saving the extra cash on a quad core CPU and spend it on maybe a slightly better video card (I was looking at a cheap NVidia or ATI card)?
Rob