AboutBobbert Expertise Questions related to processors and memory from roughly a decade of personal experience, willing to take a stab at any question you might have, with knowledge reaching from the AMD K7 (Athlon, AthlonXP, Duron, Sempron) to the AMD K8 and K9 (Athlon64, Athlon64 FX, Opteron, Athlon64 x2, Phenom X3/X4) generations, and from the Intel Pentium III to Core 2 generation, as well as accompanying technologies, including mainboards, chipsets, and memory.
Experience Computer enthusiast and hobbyist, years of IT experience here and there (still always room to learn!).
Question I'm looking to but a new desktop pc but I don't understand the dual vs quad processors. I don't have the need for a quad (as far as multitasking) but am I costing myself computing power by getting a Quad and NOT running 3-4 jobs simultaneously ? Is the Ram divided by 4 and dedicated to each processor or is running 2 jobs on a Dual the same as running 2 on a Quad?
Answer The easiest answer to all of your questions is "no", excepting the final question, to which I would answer "yes". All the quad core processor will do is add an additional two cores to the system, if an application can take advantage of the more advanced multi-threading abilities of a quad-core system (relative to a dual core or single core system), you will likely see some performance advantage. If the application will not, you will not see any "extra" performance (unless the quad core processor of choice outclasses the dual core processor of choice, for example the newest Intel Core i7 975, compared to a dual core Pentium D, will be faster at any application, due to other reasons (for example more efficient interface to the memory)).
If you can afford the quad core with no problems, I don't see any explicit reason to avoid such a purchase, it won't damage performance, shouldn't raise the power consumption up too much, and with more SMP friendly applications (for example video encoding, or playing back HD video content), you will see a healthy performance advantage over a single or dual core CPU.
If you have any further questions, or would like clarification, feel free to post a follow-up.
