Conclusion

Through our testing of the dual and single-core CPUs from Intel, we have tried to accurately portray the story from both sides of the current CPU configurations. The questions brought up in the introduction were answered to the best of our abilities and have shown some good results in favor of the dual-core CPU.

Testing has shown that while dual-core and gaming can be a lucrative deal, it really only gets useful if the rest of your system is already powerful enough, and simply being held back by your current CPU. This means that your video card and memory subsystems have to be plenty fast -- in the order of SLI, we saw, if you've already got a fast CPU that you feel is holding you back. Even in the case of mostly single-threaded games (most of which are), Windows can offload its internal housekeeping and driver tasks to the second core, allowing your game to enjoy a minor performance bump on the first core that it would then have all to itself. When games start getting multi-threaded, a dual-core CPU will provide an even larger performance bump.

So what does this say for all of the people out there who have bought or are considering an Intel-based system and dual-core? Well, as we have shown with our testing, you can see that half of our tests gave us a performance increase, some only with lower resolutions, while the other half has shown no increase at all. Keep in mind that the increases were only shown when in an SLI configuration, lending credence to the above conclusions.

When it comes to gaming systems, the one with the fastest components wins ... right? Well, yes and no. In reality, it depends more on having a healthy balance between the components. A blazing fast CPU and slow-poke video card won't get you anywhere, nor will a $599 video card and low-end CPU. When it comes to a dual-core CPU in today's times, you simply need an already-fast every-thing else to see a performance bump in your games. In tomorrow's times, that performance bump will probably come to those with medium-end video cards and memory too, because of the push for multi-threaded games.

In our exploration of dual-core vs. single-core gaming on Intel, we have learned that with the right hardware balance, software support (in the form of an operating system supporting multiple cores, and multi-core optimized drivers), a dual-core processor will yield healthy performance improvements in some of your games -- not to mention the obvious benefits of having dual cores for the regular battery of multimedia applications.

In the future, we would like to apply this same magnifying glass to the other side of the fence -- AMD's Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2. Knowing that the Athlon 64 is already a splendid processor for gaming, will the addition of a second core in that case bump up our performance, or is a single, highly-clocked Athlon 64 core plenty enough to feed even the hungriest of graphics setups? We'll get around to that eventually, but until then, you can use what you've learned here and apply that to any purchasing decisions to be made in the near future.