Hey guys :) Just a quick question.

I'm about to click buy on a new computer and I've been trawling the net for a while now and my head is hurting. I've taken overclocking and GPUs and price and all that nonsense into consideration, and I'm tired :P

So I thought I'd just try and get a simple answer from the most awesome community on the net.

Quad or 6 (Hex?) core for gaming?

The only games I really play on the PC is the Sims and I'm looking forward to the new Simcity game.

(The other thing I do on a PC is video editing).

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Cheers guys.

Joey.

More cores just help with multitasking. A lot of programs, especially games, still don't take full advantage of multicore processors. It's the speed that is still important. I would just go with 4, though having an i7 is like having 8 with 4 physical cores.

Edit: though it's always good to look at benchmarks for each product and compare.

All you really need is a quad core processor. Plenty fast, especially for your needs.

I wish I'd gone with Intel when I built this machine but the hexacore AMD 1090T was so much cheaper at the time. I don't think there's any other reason to stray from a quad core intel processor even now.

Thanks for the replies, guys. :)

Like the above have said, you really don't need to worry about the cores past 4 that much. Hardly any program can use that many cores, so all it'll do is offload a very small amount of background programs.

Maybe if you're crazy into multitasking it would be worth it.

There is literally no point to getting anything higher than quad core right now. GPU is where the money really makes the difference on a gaming PC.

Get an i5.

No, really, I recently made a thread on the subject of processors and also scoured the web for info, and that answer is almost unanimous - i5 2500K processors give the best bang for your buck. Ten dollars more nets you the new Ivy Bridge 3570K. I wound up opting for a 3470 since I don't plan on overclocking, but at the end of the day an i5 is and has been the gold standard.

@ervonymous:

I really like my 1100T 6core. If you have the power overclock the crap out of it. Mine is running at 4Gigs and a hint guys the phenom2 turbo core back then really sucks turn it off.

@PHARAOH: Not that I have any real gripes with it, I just haven't been able to push it beyond 3.6ghz after a BIOS update and I'm tired of fiddling with it.