hi i want to buy a processor but im confused abt which 1 2 buy. I hav in mind core 2 duo E8400 but some ppl r telling me 2 buy core 2 quad q9300 i dont know the difference between the 2 plz help me?
And what is overclocking ?
[edit] just re-read it and noticed that you do not have a "current" cpu; whereever i say "current" cpu I mean the dual-core.
Overclocking is when you force an electronic device to run faster than it is designed to run, or faster than it is sold to run (sometimes faster chips are marked as slower chips because it is cheaper to make the faster chips).
Example: Your current chip runs at 3.0GHZ per core; if you make it run at 3.4GHZ per core...that is overclocking.
Also, quad-core is not just for dual graphics. Most new games should run just as well (if not better), old games will run slower...but they will still be running faster than they were ever writen to run.
Going from a 3.2 dual-core to a 2.6 quad core made no noticable difference in most games, but improved some a little. The big difference is in resource-hungry apps like solidworks and photoshop. These programs are written very poorly, but the multi-processor support is written very well.
The only advanatage your current chip has over the quad-core is that some programs can only use one core, and these programs would loose 0.5GHZ with this upgrade...I don't think there is ANY company writing PC games for single-core processors. If they are, they are targetting the eeePC.
The extra cache of a Quad core CPU means no game will really run slower if you put a quad core in, but since very few games can make use of a quad core right now, you won't see very many games at all when you use one.
