I currently have a E8600 core 2 duo for my late Win XP machine but the motherboard also supports the late core 2 quad CPU's. Anyways my question is are there many Win XP era games (early 2000- roughly 2008) that even take advantage of more then 2 cores to bother?
I wouldn't have bothered if I had an E8600. High end quads are still expensive, can't see how the cost can be justified for an upgrade that won't make much of a difference.
If you really want a quad core CPU for some reason, you might want to look into modding your mobo to accept socket 771 CPU:s instead. Socket 771 Xeons can be picked up for peanuts, guess the market for selling server grade CPU:s is quite limited. Did the mod on my Asus P5B Deluxe, and put a Xeon X5470 in it. Works like a charm, and it seems to overclock extremely well. Had it running stable at 4 GHz on air cooling when testing how far it could be taken. The 12 MB cache doesn't hurt either.
In short you'll need to cut away the socket's keying, glue a sticker to the Xeon, patch a bios image with the correct microcode for whatever stepping CPU you got if you can't find a prepatched one, and flash it. Then you just install the Xeon like any other CPU. Here's a comprehensive guide if you're interested.
Quad cores are a waste for XP rigs unless it is dual booting another os that can make use of it as XP is limited to just two cores/threads. E8600 is one of the better procs for XP as there is nothing too waste and its dirt cheap.
As for the quad cores they are going down in price, just bought a QX6700 for $25.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
