I was reading up some of the reviews on the new AMD 6 core CPUs and it sounds like most games benefit more from a faster core than multiple slower ones. However this got me wondering about my current x4 - does Windows (vista and/or 7 specifically) take advantage of multiple cores if I run multiple games and/or apps at the same time? Do I need to manually assign affinity (I remember having to do that with my first x2 to even get games like EQ/EQ2 running without crashing)?

Windows 7 is better at core assignment than xp/vista, but to take any significant advantage of multiple cores, the app/game needs to be written to do so.

Very few games are written to take advantage of multiple cores. Unless John Carmack wrote it, chances are it's a single threaded game and thus more cores won't help.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I understand that. What I'm getting at is sometimes I multi-box 5 WoW accounts (I am guessing WoW is single threaded) on a Phenom II x4. Would my performance benefit from upgrading to one of these x6 CPUs?

Basically I'm thinking more cores than single threaded games = each game getting almost-exclusive use of one. Is this true? Does it happen automatically or do I need to manually (or through some utility) assign affinity?

Win7 will handle that automatically.

However, I think your speed increase 5boxing wow would be, at best, minimal.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]