In the world we live in today; more is always better, or is it? When the single core processor was the mainstay for most medium priced desktop computers; it was a big jump to go to a dual core processor. In those days the big Pentium dual core processors really made a difference. Now your computer could really do two things at the same time. They were pretty expensive when they first came out. It didn’t take the industry long to come up with a smaller less powerful dual core processor. Most buyers were just looking for the word “Dual Core”. These cheaper processors were really not much better than the single core processor.
Fast forward to today and everyone must have a Quad core processor. More is always better right? There is a lot more going on inside a computer than just the amount of cores in a processor. Take a quad core processor with a gigahertz (or power rating of 2.40 GHZ) If you match that against a dual core processor with a 3.0GHZ rating; the dual core is faster by far! You might say “But I can do more things at the same time with a quad core processor.” Not really! These small quad core processors are all hat and no cattle! I might have a big V-8 muscle car but the 4cyl Honda race car will blow my doors off!
If you want to have a quad core processor, be sure to get the real deal. You need at least an Intel i5 quad core with a 3.0 or higher GHZ number. I’m sure that AMD has the same example but I don’t deal with many of them. Now I know someone out there is thinking “what about the i7 big daddy processor. Again these processors have different generations. A second generation i5 might be faster than a first generation i7 processor. In every system there is a bottle neck that can cap the speed of the processor. You have bus speed of the motherboard, amount and speed of ram, hard drive speed and also the processor.
You can visit many websites dedicated to comparing one processor against another. It can get complicated and the results can vary from a lot to a subtle difference. Now there is a new player in town that changes everything, the solid state hard drive or SSD. If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive; an SSD will be at least five times as fast. If you have a second generation i5 quad core processor paired with a solid state drive; it will be much faster than the newest i7 quad core with a mechanical hard drive.
Now if you are a gamer please just ignore this article. We know your need for speed is not what the average user is interested in. For the rest of us almost any i5 processor with 8GB of ram paired with a good SSD will more than meet all your needs.