I was eagerly awaiting the release of the core2 architecture last year but decided to hold out to see if there would be any bargains around Christmas time. This was also the scheduled release time of the quad core version.
As the time neared I began reading reviews and seeing what programs would utilise all 4 cores and found that the list was short. However, for an equivalent price I could have bought the X6800 chip which although has a higher core speed (2.93GHz vs 2.66GHz) only has 2 cores. For future proofing I decided to get the quad core.
Before installing this chip a bios update was needed in order for my motherboard to pick up the chip and would fail to boot without it. Windows however does not need to be reinstalled and picked up all 4 cores perfectly and went about balancing the load from my running programs around all cores. I ran a few in game benchmarks against a friend with the X6800 chip and my QX6700 was noticably slower. However, the tides were turned when we tested encoding where the quad core beat it by a sizable margin.
Overall, yes the X6800 is faster at present in games and around windows but if you need to encode or do any other multi threaded work the quad core is very much faster. As they are a similar price, I stand by my decision to go quad core if only to future proof my PC for a further 6 months. And as always, for the top of the range chip you will pay top dollar but that is to be expected.
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