Multitasking and Quad Cores.

[The_Blood_Raven]

I have a E6750 @ 3.6 GHz, and have had it up to 4 GHz. I also own a Q6700 for my storage PC, not server. Now I originally kept the E6750 when I found that it slightly out performed the Q6700 in gaming. This was a major surprise, and when I overclocked both (to the max, beleive me), the E6750 still held its ground. This surprised me so I bought a E6850, and was about to send my E6750 back when the E6850 arrived. Long story short the E6850 is the EXACT same proccessor just overclocked, but I'm getting off the point. I use AIM, listen to music, and check my email as I play games and the E6750 @ 3.6GHz was plenty, even when play Supreme Commander. This leads me to beleive the E8500 or the E8400 (if the E8500 is just an overclocked E8400, I hate Intel sometimes) will do fine for your purposes.

 

[cyberjock]

I had an old Xeon Dual CPU computer many years ago before there was such a thing as 'dual core'. The closest was Intel's HT technology. Sure, I couldn't benchmark record scores because 1 thread can only run on 1 CPU, and I could play any game I wanted and zip a file, defrag, and virus scan at the same time, and the game never knew the difference.

 

[TBard]

You aren't doing acoustics modelling with BEM are you?

I know what the boundary element method is and the basis of it, but it was just some trivia we've done during the lessons, it's not a part of my courses. It's just audio editing and signal processing, depending on the course (we just used Sourforge and Mathcad with the Signal Processing expansion for now)

I use AIM, listen to music, and check my email as I play games and the E6750 @ 3.6GHz was plenty, even when play Supreme Commander. This leads me to beleive the E8500 or the E8400 (if the E8500 is just an overclocked E8400, I hate Intel sometimes) will do fine for your purposes.

I don't doubt that, I can do more than that even with mine (maybe not playing Supreme Commander, it goes at 10 fps 😀)
My original question wasn't "which one should I buy" it was "considering I'll have enough other application to use up at least 25-30% of a core if I used a dual core, if those application were switched to a 3rd or 4th core, and supposing I'm running a game that uses 2 cores, would that offset the clock disadvantage the 4 cores have over the dual?"
If the answer is "yes, maybe, more than half" I'd have no doubt on going on a quad core, else I'd still have doubt.
But I'm already quite sure I'll get a Quad 😛