At the moment, I typically have the following running:
- Lots of (we're talking at least 10) Opera tabs open (especially when
I'm doing work when I need to refer to several pages at once)
- Thunderbird
- Zonealarm
- MSN Messenger
- Winamp
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft Word (usually at least 2-3 separate documents open)
This is my idea of multi-tasking. There's no DVD encoding or Photoshop
going on (or other really CPU intensive applications). I want my PC to
besnappy when I'm working with all this running, and remain snappy when
I open more Opera tabs, or more Microsoft Word documents.
The applications you list are all quite happy to sit in the
background while the app you use in the foreground gets the
higher priority, most CPU time. Over a single core CPU, a
dual core will make things a little snappier, particularly
with an antivirus app and Winamp running in the background.
For these applications, a faster clocked dual core CPU will
_always_ be faster than a quad core, but frankly for these
applications the difference won't be much, above all you
would want to be sure you have ample memory - even more if
you'd run Vista. 2GB is a nice starting point, though
frankly if you plan on a few years of use I would go ahead
and get 4GB now as right now DDR2 memory has a very good
price-point but in the future when DDR3 memory starts taking
up more of the memory manufacturer's capacity it will be a
situation as with DDR1, that DDR2 will become more costly.
Snappy comes from a well performing CPU. If so, then when I'm playing a
few games, as long as I have a decent GPU, I can expect good performance
there as well.
Well, you gave a list above which in total was less
demanding than even a single newer game. The games will
benefit most from a good video card, whether dual or quad
core won't make much difference given the choices you're
considering, but for most new games today the higher clocked
dual core is still faster.
I made a passing comment previously about heat, which I
should elaborate on. Suppose for example your heatsink can
cope with 130W of heat (a random number I pulled out of thin
air, I'm too lazy at the moment to look up expected wattage
of either CPU overclocked and make a graph of that) before
you deem the required fan noise unacceptibly high in order
to keep the temps low enough.
Given this threshold for peak heat generation, you would
have the option of overclocking a dual core until it reaches
that noise threshold, or a quad core. The quad will be
running at a lower clockspeed when it reaches this
threshold, enough difference in clockspeed that the dual
core will be faster at the described uses. I don't mean to
suggest it will be hard to keep the CPU cool in general,
only that if you were ever to be running tasks where either
both of the dual cores or 3 or more of the quad cores on
either respective processor were utilized enough that the #
of cores would be a factor, you would then be in a highly
loaded running state where you did see how high the
clockspeed goes before it becomes a stability concern, or a
noise concern when the (typical) motherboard is throttling
fan speed based on temp.
). What's been holding