Well actually, this is a hard decision. In the case you provided, I would go for the dual core, since it has 2mb more cache and obviously a faster frequency. (higher cache has proven to drastically improve game performance)
Games nowadays don't really take advantage of quad core, maybe some of the new ones but I doubt it. If you are aiming for a machine to play next gen games, multi-task, and maybe even virtualization, I'd go quad core. Technically speaking, a dual core coded game will run faster on the dual than on the Quad, because the game is only optimized for two, you're
only using two, which means: 3.16GHz (6mb L2 cache) vs 2.33GHz 4MB L2 cache).
I predict that developers will start to optimize games for quad core systems within the next year, considering that fact that quad and beyond is Intel and AMD's focus right now. Intel is going to release an octo-core processor (8 cores), pretty soon.
If I were you, I would either get a faster Quad, with more cache, or stick with the dual core.
Just my 2 cents,
Christian
Edit:
Dimensional said:
I would get the quad core.
I've used this website called "Can You Run It" to determine what games I can play, among other things, and every time it reads all the cored as one, adding then together.
The 3GHz dual core would read around 6GHz while the 2.5GHz quad core would read around 10GHz. I think that sums it up nicely.
That is completely irrelevant, don't believe everything you see on the internet. You don't add up the frequencies like you did (dual core at 3.0 GHz is NOT 3.0 x2, it will always be 3.0!), anybody in the computer field should know that. More cores is used for multitasking, i.e. an emulator or game, uses one core at 3.0 GHz for graphics rendering, and the other core at 3.0GHz for sound processing. The computer treats them as two seperate processors, and the reason to do this, is to off the load and make it easier and more efficient for the app to process both at the same time, hence the name "multi-tasking".
The site you referred to is rubbish if they teach people that.
BTW, the dual core has 6MB of L2 cache, whereas the quad core only has 4MB of L2 cache. The cache is not per-core, but is shared, so more cache, better performance.
The dual core is ultimately the bets option for you, and these 45nm chips are easy to overclock (anything under 65nm is, i.e. my E1200 à 1.6GHz is now at 3.0 GHZ at 43°C Idle, with an asus fan cooler. You could easily overclock that baby to 3.5 or 4.0 GHz and keep the temp pretty low, and that will just blow the quad core away, it's a no brainer.
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Psionic Roshambo:
like a 250 dollar kit back when DDR4 was Intel only
