New PC question

[DarkPenguin]

How many cores can lightroom effectively use?

Specing out the new machine and I see that the 2.4ghz core 2 quad is about the same price as the 3ghz core 2 duo.  The core 2 duo would be nice if I buy call of duty 4.  But if lightroom would be happier with more cores I'll go with the core 2 quad.

[John.Murray]

Great Question!  I just did a quick check on my home desktop (Dual CPU - Dual Core Xeon - Vista) and most LR tasks seemed fairly evenly spread among each core.  There are some exceptions - Slide Show and Web Creation seemed to be dumped primarilly to a single core, with exception of disk IO (?)  (this machine is dual controller SCSI Raid, so i'm not really sure what o/head should be in this type of app).  I'll load some trace tools (from sysinternals) and report more results . . . .

-John

[DarkPenguin]

Very cool.  I'm leaning towards going with sheer speed of core rather than more of them.

I'm jumping from an AMD 3800+.  I'm pretty sure the 50% clock increase combined with the faster core 2 architecture should about double the processing power.  So I should be happy with this no matter what.