I think people are overhyping quad cores a little too much. For most average joes, they are simply... unnecessary.
64bit technology has been touted for many years now... Even my AMD 3200+ 7 years ago had that mysterious "64bit" perk. It was useless to me then, and it is useleless to me now. And I bet it will remain being useless to me for some time to come. I havent found ANY game that would "require" 64bit technology or that would "greatly" benefit from running on a 64bit OS. I max out most games at 60FPS!!! Why in the hell would I need more? As for software, I dont deal with video encoding, photoshop, 3d Max or any of that jazz... A very big number of people dont even know what those are! (short of photoshop off course) There are alway complications with implementing a 64bit OS even now. I tried getting into it, but I discovered that it requires and additional monetary investment into more RAM. But I dont need more than 3.2Gigs... I hardy ever use that whole amount. Ever.. Even when running very modern games.
Why in the hell would I talk about 64bit tech in this thread you may ask... Well, that is because I am trying to make a point. I am trying to say that quad cores are as useless and unnecessary to most folks as 64bit technology is!
If I was to upgrade to a quad core I would want to see a CLEARLY visible, performance boost in my PC overall and in MOST software that I run on it. Right now, it is simply not the case! Everyone is talking about how wonderful quad cores are at multitasking.... What multitasking?! I cant run protoshop, unzip a big rar file and play Crysis on my dual core... Guess what, I went to my friends house, and I cant do that on his quad core either! Untill I can see that kind of performance difference, I really dont see what multitasking people talk about when they mention quad cores. Can anyone give me some clear, concrete examples of the multitasking in question?
Now, I dont want to sound like a hippocryte.. I will be getting a quad core myself soon. But that's not because it's a quad core. It's because these CPUs are becoming very affordable, and Sandy Bridge is simply much faster than my current CPU.
When it comes to WinRAR, I realize it is bottlenecked by my HD. but shouldt I be able to at least run several other programs simultaneously with using WinRAR or scanning my HD for viruses?
Oh.. and I dont play World of Warcraft - It's a waste of money every month, and you'll never be 1337 enough, no matter how much you grind. And Supreme Commander is a horrible game. TA was much better.