3GHz Dual Core or 2.66GHz Quad Core?

Question

Should I get a 3GHz Intel Core2 Duo, or a 2.66GHz Intel Quad Core? I'll mainly be modding/playing Crysis. So which one?

Answer 1

Quad will be ok, because +2 additional cores will be useful in the nearest future

Answer 2

the faster clocked dual core will out perform the quad on pretty much all games up till now.

BUT

Crysis is one of the few games that will actually utilise the potential of a quad core, and will run better on the quad than the higher clocked dual.

Intel is planning the release of 6 and 8 core cpus in the near future, and with the upsurge of quads in the market share you can safely assume that more game developers will be going down this track.

So - if you're playing a lot of current games and older games - the DC

If you specifically want crysis and future games fps, the quad.

Answer 3

Cheaper one; as CPUs they are both overkill, spare no expense on the video card/GPU. CryENGINE very heavy on GPUs.

Answer 4

Very few apps/games are currently written to support multiple threads, and most of the ones that are only support two threads. Recent high-end games like Crysis might support 4 threads, I'm not sure, but as it stands right now you will almost always get better performance from a faster dual-core than you will from a slower quad-core. The only major exceptions are 3D rendering and audio & video conversion.

If you want to be prepared for the future when developers start adding multi-thread support to games and apps, go for the quad-core. Provided you have a decent heatsink/fan and a case with good airflow you should be able to overclock the quad-core up to around 3 GHz on stock voltage. If you have options to increase the voltage in your BIOS you can probably get it up to around 3.3 - 3.5 GHz. You could probably get the dual-core close to 4 GHz, though.

Of course none of this matters if you don't have a powerful video card.

Answer 5

God d**n it, use your head.

Both suck c**p for this game unless you overclock, Crysis is stupid as h**l in optimization. Get the Quad core but you'll get a 10% increase in Crysis and a -30% increase on all your apps!

Almost all games run on one or two cores, So the C2D will pwn them.