Well Jeff Atwood has read my mind again and written a great post about going from a dual core  to a quad core CPU  that makes for fascinating reading.

Link: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000942.html

My Dell Precision 390 can take a Quad core CPU and I have been debating the merits of an upgrade.  It currently runs a rather pedestrian sounding Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz.

It would appear I am just not going to benefit from a Quad core CPU upgrade outside a few areas like media encoding or compilation. It’s great that excel 2007 can benefit from more cores, but I doubt anyone outside of science or finance is going to need a Quad core CPU to add up their sums.

In other words my current Dual Core 1.86Ghz is more than capable of handling my everyday needs. I even ran Bioshock on it the other day and it ran fine.

Sure a leap from 1.86Ghz to 2.66Ghz would be nice and an improvement, but even I can’t justify it. The current CPU does a great job. It just doesn’t feel slow.

Anyway check out Jeff’s article if you need to be talked out of a unnecessary CPU upgrade.