[gekko]

Why are you investing in a quad-core setup? Those are pretty much useful for A) rendering farms and B) build machines.

Quad-cores are only useful if you do heavy multi-tasking, so heavy you want a dedicated core for each application. One application can only run from one core, and that's the end of story. You launch an application, it gets one core and never sees any of the others. Despite common belief, multi-threading does not support multiple cores. Having additional threads are still part of the same program and they use the same CPU.

To use multiple-cores for a single application, it requires managing multiple processes. Essentially, if you're appying a filter in Photoshop to a 19,200 x 14,400 image, the program can split the image in half, and use one CPU to render each half of it, then kill the child process and be happy. It doesn't matter which one finishes first, or the order.

Multi-threaded programming is a huge headache in general, and games are really slow to adapt to it. Since games are designed to simulate real-time, everything needs to be done in a certain order to create the suspension of disbelief. It's hard to do multiple tasks simultaneously because you can't handle collision detection until all the objects have moved, and to move the objects you need to do the physics calculations which can't happen until the input has been updated. Everything has a specific order it must be done in, and doing two things at the same time can completely break the game.

Everyone wants to tell you that games in a couple years will all support a zillion cores and your game will hit 300fps. In reality, Xbox 360 sits with 3 cores and Microsoft gives speeches every year on the state of multi-core programming and where we've come since 2005. Almost nowhere. Even the games that will add support for multi-core processors are doing it because there's a million gamers out there that will buy the game just to post their frame rate on a message board somewhere. In reality, you assume supporting dual cores means the game runs twice as fast, when in reality they might've just moved the audio streaming from a second thread to a different processor entirely.

Games won't be supporting multi-cores in full for many years, and while PCs are thought of as the leaders in technology, it'll be the consoles where multi-core will become successful. When they finally figure it out on Xbox 360, you might start seeing it come over to PCs, at least with dual-core support. Until then, don't spend the money.