Q: I'm 14 and I game and make videos from Premiere Pro CS3. I want to buy a new computer. What is a processor that is efficient and good price. I currently have a P4 @ 3.2GHz. And how much faster would the rendering rate compared to my P4 that you suggested? and im using a nvidia geforce 8600 gt 512 mb
A: The general concensus is that dual core chips are best for video games, and highly symmetrical tasks like rendering heavily benefit from a quadcore CPU. Since you want to use Premiere, I suggest a Q6600. It costs 189$ OEM from Newegg, and people have overclocked it on air to 3.6GHZ stably (I'd recommend something tamer, though.) While an older architecture, it is still faster per dollar than the new 45NM Q-series. Even if your P4 is a Pentium D (dual core, Netburst style,) you can expect CPU bound rendering tasks to run several times faster. I suggest you mate your processor with a Gigabyte P35 board and a Xigmatek air rifle cooler. Oh, and just so you know, quad core chips aren't inherently faster than dual core chips. Unless a program knows how to use more than two cores, the others will usually lay fallow until called into action. In any case, even in best case situations like synthetic benchmarks of movie rendering, it's rarely a 100% gain over a similiar dual core chip. Games, mind you, won't scale well to four CPUs for rather complex reasons. If you doubt me, just look how well that new Cell chip is working out for Sony's PS3.