You provide an excellent debate and with basis but I have to agree with enaberif that most "current games" just cannot utilise a quad and with the higher clock potential of the dual it is gonna show differences. Do some benching of the systems you have (Crysis) and have a look. Your comments are very interesting but we need some data to show it.
I didn't want to start a Flame War guys, let's be really clear about this.
lol no worries man, enaberif and i have been at odds about this before. neither of us seem to be able to give the other the last word...
but you ask for proof, Dwayne has already given it! check his link on the first page, it'll tell you all you need to prove that what i'm saying is without a doubt correct (about quad vs dual in gaming having no difference)
here is a quick link to the crysis bench:
CPU scaling in games with dual & quad core processors
i want to point out, that i did say there WAS a small difference "at lowest settings" anything up from there, no.
notice that even a STOCK Q6600 is on equal footing as the e8400, even beeing 600mhz slower. (looking at the 1280 x 1024 resolution) and this trend is true for almost every game that review tests.
Vista will do its best to utilize every cpu core you have, regardless of weather the program is designed to be multi threaded or not, if you have mp3 player, utorrent, web browser, web browser, web browser, ms word, msn messenger, yahoo, aim, icq, irc, blah blah, blah, blah, window open all at the same time (as most of us are wont to do these days) then vista will spread the load around even though none of those apps are multi threaded.