Being an owner of the older Intel Quad-Core series, a Q6600, I've been wondering about making it into a Dual-Core by shutting off two of the cores.
The reason I've been thinking about this is because several places I've read that Dual-Cores are better for gaming while Quad-Cores seem to do better in the area of media encoding and such. From what I read the reason for this is something to do with the L2 memory but honestly I can't completely remember why. ATM I run a Q6600 anywhere from 3.2Ghz - 3.6Ghz and I was wondering if it would do better as a Dual-Core and the same if not higher clock. I don't do a lot of media encoding but I am a big gamer so I was curious if this would be beneficial or a waste of my time.
I'm no expert for sure. However, unfortunately, it doesn't stop me from giving some thoughts. I believe you are thinking that the games are using all 4 cores. That is not so. From what Skuzzy has said, AH is one of the few multi-threaded games around. Even then no matter how many cores you have it only uses two. So whether you have 4 cores or 2 cores it doesn't matter, it's only going to use 2. Video editing on the other hand, as I understand, can use the 4 cores. Therefore it's faster in that environment. What really matters is the clock speeds, according to experts. Most quads run slower than duo cores. If your quad runs the same as a duo core then you are having the same experience as that duo core. Providing all other factors are equal.
That's how I see it and that's the conclusion I draw from what I have heard and read. Hopefully someone will either agree or correct my thinking.
