Dual or Quad core?

[Sovereign]

I can attest to a Q6600 being stable at 3GHz on stock cooling; it ran Prime95 for twelve hours. Temps broke into the 75C range (as measured by CoreTemp) but the processor never had a problem.

 

[mryerse]

ouch, hot. Wonder what intel burn test would bring it too (don't recommend testing that).

Mine hits about 69 when encoding h.264 with a freezer 7 pro.

 

[Zero82z]

But take a look at the architectures that were in place at the time, K8 and Netburst.

Dual-core K8 and Pentium D chips are holding up much better nowadays than their single-core counterparts. Anyone who invested in a dual-core chip a few years ago is getting a lot more longevity out of it than people who went single-core when they were considered to be faster. The same thing will happen with current quads. Although obviously future chips will be a lot faster than current ones, a quad from today will still hold up better in a couple of years than a dual-core chip will.