jackflash keep in mind this is a family site
The new processors coming from Intel will only have marginal differences in terms of performance per clock, we are looking around a 2% gain.
The advanges are as follows:
-Created on a 45nm manufacturing process
-Since it's on a 45nm manufacturing process, the creates a lower power consumption and therefor you CPU generates much less heat.
-There are HUGE gains in SSE4 coding which will likely be seen in the future.
-Since there is much lower heat output, there is a larger potential to overclock, even on air. 4.2GHz is easily achievable on water, engineering samples went up to 4.4GHz on air, but don't expect this.
While no games with be quad core multithreaded in the near future they still do give a benefit to gamers. Since we are now beginning to see more and more dual core multithreaded applications/games, you don't want to have you operating system uses these two cores. So with a quad cores, you have 2 cores for gaming and the other two cores being used to calculate things for your operating system such as background services.
While we have 1 Penryn processor out right now, it's 1,200 dollars. The entire family will be released as early as December, or as late as January.
Whether or not you can wait, thats only a call you can make for yourself
I'm running Crysis on high to very-high settings.
E6600@ 2.9GHz (setting up water cooling after finals)
HD2900XT @ 800/900
James