My room-mate is planning to buy a new desktop. She asked me to help her out, but it's been a while since I've bought/built a PC, so I've been looking around a little.

We've been to a local mega-store just to see what they had. Most of it was i5 or i7, mostly quad cores. Looking on the internet, I've noticed that people often recommend fast dual cores instead of quad cores for gaming.

She was looking at an i7-2600 (quad) with a GeForce GT545 graphics card.

What do you think? Should she go for a dual core instead? Also, opinions on the graphics card are most welcome, as you can see I'm totally out of the loop as far as PCs go.

Well if your roomate was a serious gamer, I wouldnt hesitate to recommend a quadcore. Fast dualcore's can still get the job done in most cases, but so many games support 4+ threads now it's better to get a quad unless your on an extreme budget. But I think it's a little odd pairing an i7-2600 with a GT545. I'll have to look at some benchmarks for that card. but it's definately not a videocard for serious gaming.

Wow it's tough to find anything on that card. It looks like it's supposed to compete with AMD's HD6670. Just based on naming it's gotta be weaker than a GTX 550.

Serious gamer... nah, not that hardcore. She would like to be able to at least run new PC games though.

From what I've gathered, most people aren't very positive about the GT545.

Aren't the vast majority of processors out now quads anyway? I'm a bit behind the times...

Yeah... i5 seems to be the standard nowadays. i3s are dual cores (or so they told me) and are still available for relatively cheap. I saw a lot of i7s.

I'm so behind the times, it's not even funny.

If she's not that serious then an i3 or a gt545 would probably be fine. I would stay away from the new 'Pentiums' or 'Celerons'. I recently built a G620 system only because I got the parts supercheap and was less than impressed with performance. I'll probably give it away here.

i'm so behind the times i only have one core

I booted up my old PC from when I was at Uni. 733 Celeron, one HDD with 20GB and one with 30.

THAT'S OLD SKOOL.

(It's not that old skool really, but I was amused to find it still booted quickly)

Heh similar specs to the original xbox.

i have a computer collecting dust in a closet with a 300MHz P2

(i'm sure someone here can beat that with something they have hidden away in a closet/garage/attic/someplace)

BULLDOZER

I've got a 486 that still runs like a dream on Windows 3.11. Need a boot disk to run Dark Forces though, haha. Gave away my Pentium 100 to my friend years ago, upgraded it for him. I also have two Pentiums II - 233, Two Pentium IIIs (different clocks - not entirely sure what), my current desktop is a 7 or 8 years old Pentium IV - 3.2 Ghz that I upgraded from time to time. One of these days I'm going to throw a decent version of Win98 on one of the P2s, so I can play all my old Win95/98 and DOS games.

Looks like she's not going for the i7 system I mentioned earlier. After reading up, it looks like some of the parts are cheap. The brand of the motherboard isn't mentioned anywhere in the description and people on the internet have complained about it being a cheap piece of trash. I recommended her to make sure the motherboard is at least Asus or some other well known brand.

Here's the system I'm talking about. The site is in Dutch, but the specs should be understandable.

From what I've read about the GT540 series, I understand it's supposed to be a current-gen graphics card for PC gamers, so it should be adequate.

Is GOD AWFUL trash.

It's 2011, get a quad core i5 2500k, overclock it if you ever get bored (it's super easy just push the overclock button in the EFIBIOS) and call it a day. The reason people used to recommend Dual over Quad is because back then very few things supported quad core, and getting the two extra cores meant taking a **** on the clock speed, not so today when literally everything has an ultra insane clock speed regardless, and quad cores are supported.
AMD is trash unless you are on a serious budget, Bulldozer performs not only worse then any intel in it's price range, but the AMD chip it was built to replace. (It has to do with it being designed by idiots who apparently thought the Pentium D was the epitome of CPU design, and also came up with a new moronic "modular" architecture that just ends up confusing operating systems. As a bonus it's not "8 core" at all, it's far closer to 4 core hyperthreaded then anything.)
i7s are Quad Core hyperthreaded, which basically means it won't be much faster except in super-high demanding 3D CAD applications, and the GT 540 is a lower mid-range card. That thing looks pretty good for the price. Buy it.

screw quad core... you need SIX CORES and 24GB of RAM

I'm building my new and blatantly excessive system sometime in the next week. Look for my shameless bragging thread soon.

6 Core hyperthreaded and 32 gigs, Task Manager looks all squished and hilarious.

I'll try to get a screenshot of my friend's new work video editing machine. 2 6 core xeons with hyperthreading. Its more than a bit ridiculous.

I would go more for upgrade ability. I would probably get a dual core but make sure that the board could handle a much faster quad if the dual core got to slow.

In all seriousness, quad is pretty much the way to go.

Now if this thread were quad vs hex vs **** YOU I HAVE A SERVER then it would be interesting

is there any reason anytime soon to get 6 cores? I'm about buy a new PC, and I'll hopefully be using it for gaming, 3d modeling/drafting/rendering/illustrating for quite a while.

If you're gonna do a lot of processor-intensive stuff, yeah. If you've been thinking about a video card upgrade, that would also be a pretty good time to do it.

Right now, absolutely not. The only 6-core CPUs with even a remotely reasonable price are AMD chips. The rest are super-high end, non Sandy Bridge i7 CPUs that cost nearly $1000.

If you really need 6 core wait for Ivy Bridge in the spring.