Originally posted by: JAG87
thats untrue, and you know it.
before the quad core comes the hard drive, and if you think you can run a virus scan or encode a video while you are playing, you are dreaming my friend. the first bottleneck is the IDE/sata bus, and this will impact you whole computer when its being use intensively.
so yes, quad core is useful for speeding up multi threaded applications, but dont think that it allows such flexibility with multitasking. your tasks cannot be hard drive intensive, otherwise your performance will be hurt. and frankly, I cant think of anything that I would be doing while playing a game that is not hard drive intensive
Unfortunately, memory bandwidth is also a problem in many applications... I.e. even if you don't need to do much HD I/O, you have to be able to supply the four cores with the data that they're crunching.