Which would be faster and why? A Dual Quad Core 3GHz Xeon or One I7 Clocked @ 3GHz running Vista 64bit?

It depends on the application, really. On highly parallel applications where the program can make use of a lot of parallel processors, the oct-core system *may* be faster. In general, however, once you pass the single -> dual core jump, and particularly the dual -> quad jump, the return on investment isn't nearly what it was.

Here's why: If you have one function that has two operations, one of which can be split up equally and divided amongst the processors, but one that needs to be done serially, IE on one processor, more cores will help, but in reduced fashion. An extremely simplified version of this is if you have one function that needs 640 "processing units" and the second needs 200 "processing units", and the oct-core setup can handle 8 "processing units" per core per clock cycle, and the quad core setup can handle 12 "processing units" per cycle - the oct core system takes 10 cycles to complete the parallel part (64 units/cycle), and then for the second part takes 25 cycles, you have a total of 35 cycles. Now, the faster quad core will complete 48/cycle, thus taking 13.3 (14) cycles for the first segment, but only 16.667 (17) cycles for the second segment, thus finishing the operation in only 32 cycles.In this situation, the quad core setup is about 10% faster.

There are programs that are hugely parallel (video encoding), ones that are somewhat parallel (photoshop), and ones that are very serial in nature (can't think of an example off the top of my head). The benefit of a faster/less core system will depend entirely upon the application being used, so if you are doing something important or desire the best bang/buck ratio, you will need to look at the specific thing you want to accomplish.My bet is that the i7 will beat the oct core setup more often than not and sometimes by a pretty significant margin, but in *some* cases, the oct core setup will blow the i7 away. Again, this is a really oversimplified means of describing the potential performance difference, I am not trying to be super accurate here, but rather just point out the potential differences in areas where the performance between dual/quad/oct core setups are very different.

I am at work now, but will cite some specific benchmarks when I get home if nobody else adds them in after mine. I egt home in ~7 hours.

Both of those processors are pretty much equally fast, in that they can do everything you need them to do in fractions of a second. The things that take a longer while (like copying a couple of hundred files) will take long no matter what, but you won't have to do them that often. They will both be good for playing games and editing video, and your bottleneck in that case will be hard drive space or RAM.

Given these processors, the thing you will want to look for to improve speed is good quality RAM, at least 2GB, maybe 4GB. I'd also suggest a large hard drive or two totalling at least 500GB, maybe larger, approaching 1000GB, and a fairly good video card. The combination of those things will almost assure you won't have to worry about changes in your computer usage a few years from now.

I am making a habit of pointing out that in a number of ways disk access is now the biggest bottleneck on computers. If your speed benchmarking includes any application that access the hard drive, then my standard recommendation these days applies: The Intel X25-M SSD will provide you with an order of magnitude increase in secondary storage random access speed over mechanical disks and extremely fast data load and write speed.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.