Introduction

While venturing through the BIOS on my brand spanking new EX58-UD5 based testbed, I stumbled across an option that gives one the ability to set the amount of cores they want running on the system.

So, while I was there pondering around with the options, I wondered what would happen if we started disabling cores. How would that affect 3D performance? What I really wanted to know is how many cores we really need; one, two, three or four? - Sure, there have been articles that compare a dual core based Core 2 processor to a quad core one, but what happens if the only difference between every CPU configuration is the amount of cores while FSB, speed and memory settings are all the same?

With that in mind, cores started dropping quicker than flies on a 40c day in Australia and the benchmarks came a'flowing. I can tell you right now, the results were very interesting. So without further ado, let's get straight into the benchmarks to find out how many cores we really need for today's games.