Do you think TOR will make use of 4 cores or will we be completly safe with the tried and true E8400 and ddr2?

What Quadcore are you looking at?

Are you going to overclock your cpu?

Do you run other applications during gameplay?

 It never hurts to have 2 extra cores and change affinity for additional programs.

Well I was looking at upgrading to an i7 and the new 1366 board and ddr3.

But the only games I play on my desktop are mmo's, I'd rather play my shooters and the like on my PS3 (I know, I know).

But if TOR, Star Trek and the next gen of mmo's are not going to use more than 2 cores I'm thinking it would probably be a waste.

To answer your questions, I usually don't have anything else open when playing.  And of course I overclock.

It's way to early to know any of this type of info at this time.  However, multi-cored CPUs are the new thing and it would be wise of BioWare to adapt, especially now that the game is still being developed. 

However, I understand the game has been developed since 2005 and the quad-cores are pretty new on the market so it might not have this option.  ...But like I said, it's too early to know this information at this time, we are going to have to wait for an official answer from BioWare.

Edit:  If all you're going to be playing is MMO's, then its a gamble on what you should get.  However, quad-cores are the new thing and hopefully many newer programs, operating systems, and especially games/MMOs will start taking advantage of quad-cores. 

I have an i7 and love the hell out of that thing!  It OCs easy and runs everything sooo smooth.  However, it's so new that not everything I play takes full advantage of the quad-core and is frustrating at times.  For sure no MMO atm uses all cores and maybe one or two games I own uses all four cores.  Its a gamble for now, but little by little everything should start to use all four cores of the i7 and similar chips.

Originally posted by m240gulf

It's way to early to know any of this type of info at this time.  However, multi-cored CPUs are the new thing and it would be wise of BioWare to adapt, especially now that the game is still being developed. 

However, I understand the game has been developed since 2005 and the quad-cores are pretty new on the market so it might not have this option.  ...But like I said, it's too early to know this information at this time, we are going to have to wait for an official answer from BioWare.

Good point, now that you put it that way my safest option might be to wait till around Xmas and the release of Win7 and see what BioWare has to say by then.

It's so hard not to upgrade though with new tech, but if it's not gonna make a difference for the games I play why waste the money.

Let me give you food for thought.  Lets take WoW for an example.  You can run your operating system on Core-zero, run WoW on core's -one and -two and then run teamspeak or ventrillo on core three.  When you set it up like this, WoW will run very very smooth because it's not sharing resources with your operating system. 

The only limiting factor would be your RAM and not even if you're running on a 64bit OS with at least 6GBs of RAM using an i7.  This is what I've done and it's incredible, it's like having three computers running one game.  I've got my i7 OC'd to 3.8 and RAM running at spec 1600 (corsair 3x2GB). 

This is new technology and it's only going to get better.  The only thing like I mentioned above is there are very few things able to take advantage of all those cores, but like I mentioned above, you can customize your gameplay on those cores to make everything run soooo smooth, it's totally worth getting just for that alone.

I have an E8400 and it's well over a year old at this point... I still play everything that comes out maxed out.

CPU isn't my limiting factor, it's GPU, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Unless money is totally not an issue, take the extra money you would've put into a quad-core and put it toward a slightly better GPU.

My recommondations for someone building a computer these days are:

First and most important! 4GB, minimum. I'd skimp on GPU before memory, now that I've experienced the glory of 8GB...

Second. GPU is the main factor in performance for games, don't  be cheap with it.

Thirdly, Get at least two hard drives. One for Windows, your music, photos, porn, ect. The other for your games. Size them proportionately depending on what you have more of.

Forth Froth Fourth. Multithreading an application like a game is very difficult and time consuming to do well enough to justify being done at all. So, it seems, developers have taken the 'not bother' route. It'll take OS advances to make utilizing multiple cores in a single application, on a PC, viable. Does Windows 7 do or even begin to do this? I haven't the slightest clue. All I know about odd numbered Windows releases is that they are the ones you wanted the previous release to be. So Windows 7 is more like Vista 1.5.

In other words, number of cores are less important than speed and effciency.