I'm currently on putting the finishing touches on my new computer.  I used the excellent guides provided by Jeff Atwood (Parts I, II, III, and IV) and some, albeit severely diminished, historical knowledge to build the PC from components.  A few weeks ago I posed the question of dual-core or quad-core.  Jeff left a comment on the post:

"Do you *really* expect to be using this same machine 2 to 4 years from now?

I think that's a stretch.. buy for the next year, and let the future sort itself out later. You always end up upgrading the mobo / memory / CPU together anyway."

Though his comments carry a lot of weight, I decided to not heed Jeff's advice and to run with the quad-core processor.  As much as I hope to buy new hardware more often, my own history would prove otherwise.  I simply don't buy new hardware that often, despite Jeff's warning.

There is one other reason I opted for the quad-core.  I want to set this PC up to use virtual machines for development.  I was bitten last week by having Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 installed on the same machine.  In a virtual environment I could have a 2005 virtual machine and a 2008 virtual machine.  Having four cores then allows me to assign a virtual PC to run on specified cores.

Will the choice to go quad-core pay off?  We'll never know, cause I don't purchase hardware often enough to buy a dual-core to compare.  I'm curious about the drop in performance between a host machine and a virtual machine.  I ran some benchmarks on the new machine running Windows XP on the host and will run the same benchmarks with Windows XP running as a virtual machine.  I will report back when I have more data.