The point I am going to make is that, you would be a fool to not buy a dual socket motherboard and run/possibly run 2 quad core processors. In todays society American programmers have taken a turn for the worst. The typical mind set is hard drive space and ram are plentiful and cheap. So programmers continue to write code to be less efficient and ultimately the programs by default end up being bigger and take longer to load (i.e: Adobe illustrator, to utilize Vista Ultimate to its full potential). If you look at software applications over the past few decades you would notice the increase in size. Software was once stored on floppy’s then CD, now I am getting software that is on DVD. Its a only another 5-10 years before the first application is sent out on Blue Ray discs. I mean I bought a game that came on 3 DVDs. Imagine the computing power one needs for that. Thus why I am now rebuilding my PC with a 2 socket motherboard with quad core in each socket.

So finally to my point. I am not sure about you guys, but I like to spend my time at the gym, with friends, or more importantly going out on dates. What I hate doing is rebuilding my PC because its behind the times. Well a system with dual sockets with 4 cores in each socket. Umm yea, it’s going to be a long time before I will need to upgrade again. Not only that, technology on processors is beginning to plateau and we may go another 5 years before another major technological break through is made.

–peace

Greetings David

The more-cores-approach - they can have more cache per core, and in the case of the Opteron, they have more memory controllers per core.

Its a matter of memory starvation, memory locking, caching and memory latency/bandwidth.

On the opteron, now struggling in raw performance per die, scales nicely because for every die you have a dedicated memory controller and the advantage of local memory in a NUMA system.

Intel implements a shared cache for every 2 CPUs, even on quad core, so a 12MB cache quad core is two 6MBs, 6MB shared for 2 CPUs.

AMD implements a cache per core regardless, but its a lot smaller. This isnt a good thing.

Now, the intel, not having a memory controller per physical chip, has a shared memory FSB. So if you take a dual socket system, and put 8 cores in there (2 quad cores), you’ll have a really find system with massive memory starvation, as you get the dual channel/interleave but you go through the intel MCH to get to memory, so thats 8 CPUs lining up behing one MCH. The reason for the giant intel caches.

However, intel with the MCH, can get to new memory technologies a lot faster than AMD since its only changing the MCH and not the CPU.

In “real world/officemark” or gaming benchmarks, it is unlikely that you would see the benefit to using two dual cores vs one quad core. On the intel side it may not matter at all since the cache size per 2 cores can be made the same and there is still one MCH per two sockets.

Id get a single quad core and rejoice in the simplicity.

Add the 16 gigs of ram
And a 9600 GT nvidia graphics card