Why doesn't my school go past the 100 numbers for CSCi?

It is insufficiently european.

AMD Phenom 9600 Agena 2.3GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 2MB L3 Cache Socket AM2+ 95W Quad-Core Black Edition Processor

239 dollors not bad for AMDs newest quad. Which is what im running on my computer. You will need a bored that supports AMD+ socket though which is not to many right now

What do you mean by clocking back? A Q6600 has the same clockspeed as an E6600. A QX6850 is the same speed as as an E6850, and so on. There is no "clocking back". Furthermore, max overclocks of Core2 duos and quads of the same stock speed are virtually identical. Pardon the expression, but you are totally talking out of your ass here.



There is more to the computing world than gaming, and many applications will happily use all the cores you can throw at them, even with my poor old clocked-back Q6600 @ 3.7ghz.

If you run lots of applications at once quad core really is the way to go, and with todays prices and the overclocking potential of quads you'd have to be crazy not to go that route unless you only use your pc for gaming running no background processes. It future proofs your pc far more than a dual core does.

Exactly. Let's postulate 2 gaming enthusiasts, one with a duo and one with a quad, both heavily OC'd to around 4ghz. Let's say widespread support for quadcore in games doesn't show up for another 2 years.

Now let's further suppose that 2 years from now two (of today's)cores at 4ghz is getting to be a bit on the slow side. The guy with the duo will be forced to upgrade. The guy with the quad will effectively have already upgraded due to the games now taking advantage of all of his cores, and can put his upgrade money elsewhere.

. . . except he doesn't have any money, 'cause he spent it on the quad-core CPU. In two years the price halved, so the person who bought a dual-core can now buy a newer (and probably faster) quad-core. It'll probably use less power, too.

Quad-core CPUs can only really be recommended for those who can demonstrate a need for them right now. Most games are memory- and GPU-bound, and of those that are CPU-bound, most do not have an architecture that can take advantage of quad-cores. If you have concerns over the future, check to see that your motherboard supports quad-core chips, and then if you need one you can upgrade in the future.

Quad cores will significantly improve your performance when using software such as Adobe Photoshop or InDesign, but will not improve gameplay or general system performance much.

Put your money on a good dual core, like Intel's Q6600, and it'll last a good long while.

I think you mean the E6600 (which I have myself). The Q6600 is a quad-core.

To be fair, I must applaud Intel at having reached that price point (no doubt trying to put the boot in to AMD), but you're still paying more for something you're unlikely to use fully and which has an TDP of 105W rather than 65W. For games, spend the extra $50 on a better graphics card, more memory or a higher-speed CPU.

If you're flush, get all three and make it a quad, just don't complain if you need to buy some water-cooling as well . . . especially if you want to overclock it.

A $50 air cooler will OC a quad about as far as it can reasonably go. You need to spend a ton on watercooling to get a meaningful improvement. And tdp of the Q6600 is 95W now, the old B3s were 105.

Even in apps that dont' fully support quadcores, you get a bit of a performance increase clock-for-clock over a duo because you've got twice the cache and aren't giving up any cpu cycles to the OS and background processes. The Q6600s OC so well that they'll come within a hair of OC'd duos with much higher stock clocks that aren't much cheaper, so bang-for-your-buck is definitely there, and this should get even better when the Q9450 hits the shelves.

Still, I agree that for people who are only gamers, a quad is probably overkill right now. But once you render on a quad, or play an Immense GalCiv 2 game while encoding a dvd or doing a 3d render in the background, you'll be hooked.