But not many programs or games show dramatic performance increases when using them. Especially 4+ cores.
6 core is now advisable at the current time and especially in the future. In fact more and more games do fully support 6 cores as of today, but not much more than that, so keep it at 6 cores for now, thats the probably best spot for the near and even far future. HT can safely be disabled, gamers dont need it. But i can even afford to enable it, still to much overhead power left, and some programs may run even faster having it. In fact, for anyone having SB or Gulftown, the CPU is no limitation at all, not even in 1-2 years. Thats because nowadays games mainly focus on consoles and they arnt above those CPUs in power and uses similiar engines (the devs cant afford to create new engines all the time, its very pricy). The GPU is the bigger limitation in term every setting is at the max (which is never the case on a console) and then, dependable on the setting, it can still be a good GPU leecher. That was ofc totaly different many years ago but it has changed and now the timeline between updated and outdated, for performance reason, is much larger than many years ago. In many term, even if the CPU is twice that strong, just barely any FPS increase can be noticed, thats a completly new condition, which was totaly unknown in the past... and guess why, a over-aged engine is a good guess, and aswell because the CPU does overpower it.
But again, 6 threads will be pretty much standart soon. Have to consider that the Xbox360 is aswell having 6 threads (3 cores and every core got 2 threads). And even the PS3 is massively multithreaded, however, thats some special cell CPU which is a bit a difficult design. Still, because of that fact its a clear sign that 6 cores are the future for the "all in one CPUs". I remember, 4 years ago in the year 2007, when i told others that i want to get a quad core for games.. everyone was laughing at me and told me that it is completly useless. Then i got me a C2D, and 3 year after.. i was very mad that i didnt get a quad because i would have had massive use of it, since the games started to support 4 cores initialy.
Lesson learnt...
