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Gaming + itunes / internet radio + torrent at same time - better off with quad core?

dubcat

dubcat

dubcat

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South East, UK
I often find myself gaming and doing other things in the background. Here's a typical scenario:

I'll be playing warcraft or warhammer (may try out some FPS soon though).
Could be a download going on in the background (utorrent).
Almost definitely I will be listening to iTunes or a radio station on the internet via windows media player or real player.

So - i am convinced that dual core is much better for gaming in terms of bang for buck and was considering an E8500. However, given the fact that I do those other things too would I infact be better off with a quad core?

I am also concious of the fact that I will probably uipgrade to Nehelum when it becomes mainstream/affordable (2 years?) so am keen to get good value too.

Dub.
 
if you have iTunes running in the background while playing a game then a quad core would probably be better - tho I ended up running it on an old laptop and using an audio pass through to my main PC.

Running a torrent while gaming (online) tho isn't going to work well... the game will suffer from a lot of lag.
 
Rroff said:
Running a torrent while gaming (online) tho isn't going to work well... the game will suffer from a lot of lag.
Click to expand...

I have a 20mbps line and i rate limit my bit torrent client to a much lower value. Hasn't caused me lag issues in warcraft even on my current system which is quite old.

Having a separate music pc is something i did consider but i want to avoid it from an energy bill/clutter perspective.
 
a budget laptop i.e. the new Eee 901 wouldn't cost the earth and would be fairly low power consumption... most games will make decent use of a dual core - even games that don't support more than one thread themselves the graphic drivers, etc. seem to make use of the other core... and iTunes is quite power hungry so I'd definatly say quad core.

Even with rate limiting due to the way torrents work you get some pretty bad lag spikes - probably not that noticeable in wow - but try an fps like quake or cs and its another matter :D
 
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