Quad core PCs: Overkill and not worth the money

Several months ago, my duo core Vista PC bit the dust, and I bought a Dell Dimension 9200 with an Intel Core2 Quad CPU running at 2.4 Ghz, with 2 GB of RAM. Much to my chagrin, it doesn't seem much faster than my previous duo core system. My conclusion: Quad core PCs are overkill, and may not be worth the money for desktop PCs.

When I bought the new machine, I figured that it would be a screamer. As you can see in the screenshot below, Vista gives it a "Windows Experience Index" of 5.5, which is pretty good. But in my day-to-day computing, I haven't noticed much of a difference compared to my previous PC.

I run a nifty Vista gadget in the Sidebar, which shows me the current CPU use of each of the individual four cores, as you can see in the screenshot below.

I check it throughout the day, and all four cores are always working. But it doesn't seem as if four cores are necessarily better than two. The reason, I think, is that Vista and Windows applications haven't been written to take advantage of the four cores.

Most surprising of all is that when I run Outlook, all my other applications slow considerably. I had hoped that somehow one entire core, or possibly two, would be devoted to Outlook, freeing the other cores for other work. But when I look at the multi-core Vista gadget, I see that's not the case.

There doesn't seem to be a rush to write multi-core-aware programs. Vista doesn't seem to be particularly good at this, either. I'm hoping that Windows 7 will fix the problem, and that the next version of Office --- and Outlook --- will make better use of multi cores as well. If not, I'm not sure that four cores are worth the money for desktops. Servers, of course, are a whole different beast, and as a general rule, the more cores the better.

[Like this blog? Subscribe to the RSS feed here!]