h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What, if any are the benefits of having a slower quad-core CPU over a faster dual-core? If you wanted to build yourself a PC right now, while quad-core CPUs are still lagging behind dual-core in terms of clock speed, which would you go for, assuming that you won't be using the PC for high-end gaming or graphics programs - you just want the best CPU you can afford.

Depends how many things you like to do at once. For the moment, most applications don't make full use of more than one core - as you say, graphics programs and games are amongst the few things that do. So probably two is fine. On the other hand, looking ahead for the next 4-6 years or so (I guess a fair estimate of the lifespan of a computer), applications will start to make use of more than two cores so it might pay off in the long term. If you're not using computationally intensive apps though, why worry about processor speed? Make sure the RAM, HD and bus speeds are as high as possible, that will pay off more for future-proofing it.

So if you're not running one application that makes use of multiple cores, having multiple cores will help if you're running several applications at once (on a 32-bit system with 4GB of memory, admittedly not the fastest available but not far behind)?

I do a fair amount of encoding to flac and mp3, and I figured a higher clock speed means quicker encoding times. At some point in the future I might start editing and rendering video.

Well I guess the crucial point is whether your encoding software has multicore support. If so, you'd do well to get a quad core. If not, probably get the quicker dual core (unless you like to do other things while you're encoding your stuff).

I went for a quad core about 18 months ago, and back then it was something of a hobbyist buy. Since then things have changed, more programs support them, so I think they're probably the right option.

I'm using Audacity and FLAC, and I reckon neither of those have multicore support. I think you can export as flac on the latest Audacity... hmmm.

Any road up. I'm starting to understand the usefulness and benefits of one over the other. I frequently need to run several apps at once, and if multiple cores are going to help with that by not overloading the processor and causing dropouts in audio, that's useful.

It looks like you're using enough computational stuff simultaneously that quad core looks like a better option for future proofing. I wouldn't bother with it if you're just doing things like encoding and using Word and Firefox at the same time, because you'll only be using Word or Firefox at one time, not both, and they won't be doing any computing while you're doing that. But if you wanted to do something like some audio encoding, some video encoding, and some browsing all at the same time, then quad core would be good. Plus, things like encoding will probably be put on multiple cores in the future.