Quad core or dual core

[roryc]

I have an Amd board and was wondering which is faster A 3.1 ghz dual core or a quad core at 2.4 2.4 ghz quad core

3.1ghz dual core

Thanks

[Narayana]

That depends on what sort of applications you will be running and how they are threaded...generally speaking, though, OSX has been excellent at utilizing as many processors you throw at it (makes me miss my old Dual 867 G4...the only machine that was faster every year I owned it). If you will be rocking the standard fare (music, movies, word processing, internet use), I would go with the quadcore processor.

 

I have overclocked my i7 (currently runs anywhere from 3.6 to 3.8GHz) and find that clock rate and hyperthreading (adds four cores) do play an interesting, balancing role. In my case, I encode video often and the addition of more cores adds substantially more performance than a 10 to 15% increase in clockrate.

 

Have fun building your machine!