Dual core, Quad core??

[Kyuuketsuki]

Now, the question is, is my Dual core 2.7 faster than the Quad core 2.2? And if so, why bother with a Quad?

I have to concede I get very confused by this as well.

According to CPU performance charts (here's the Passmark one) dual core tends to be much less powerful than core 2 duo (dual core is not the same as core 2 duo) and quad core (I think they call it core 2 quad) is faster still. The problem with quad core is that there's nothing much that uses it ... as I understand it, if you use it with 32 bit Windows it won't even see 2 of the cores so that wastes your money and even if it did there are few applications that are quad core aware.

The advice I usually get is buy dual core until the OS landscape changes ... alternatively you can use Linux which I believe is fully able to use those kind of CPUs but Adrian and a couple of others would be better advisers on that than me.

Kyu