A Question.
For general use, with several tasks operating, I would think a 4 core to be faster than 2 cores. AFAIK, the review sites do benches with one program operating.
Is this accurate?
If it is, then automatic answers of Intel superiority might not be fully accurate.
This is a valid point, and one I tried to make earlier in this thread. It's not really an Intel vs. AMD question however, but a question of quad vs. dual (and to a lesser extent, the odd space that the X3 chips reside in).
The fact remains that the Athlon II with no L3 cache performs poorly in many areas, particularly gaming, compared to Intel dual core E8xxx series as well as to Phenom II with full L3 cache. In many benches the Phenom II X2 (!!) beats the Athlon II X4, due to a combination of the apps not being mutlithreaded frequency and the lack of cache.
It's probably a double-edged sword anyway with the Athlon II + heavy multitask. Even though you have more cores to run stuff on, if you are running say 90 processes rather than 60, you still only have a total of 2MB (512KBx4) L2 cache to use, which means more misses and performance hits.
Of course many end users are only moderately computer literate, and accept all manner of packed in toolbars and other crap that ends up taking process time, along with heavy antivirus suites like Norton, the quad will be definitively better than an equal dual (Athlon II X2).
To put some sort of definitive answer to this : unless you're just really short on $ and want a quad for some specific purpose, it's better to get a more powerful overall chip for the same $ with a Phenom II X3 BE, or if more $ is available, either get a PhII X4BE, X6BE, or i5 7xx or better on the Intel side. The only way I'd recommend a S775 CPU such as the E8400 today is either used and cheap or for an existing setup that someone didn't want to bother completely rebuilding with new mobo/ram/etc. It's all about practicality.