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[mikefictiti0us]

Ugh, my advice is to stay away from the AC97. Apart from the fact that it does not support EAX (and EAX makes a huge difference in audio immersion, in my opinion), I've had some nightmarish performance issues in the past with the AC97 and a certain number of games, especially FEAR.

I bought an Audigy 4 several months ago for AU$55 from Ebay, and I have yet to have any problems with it. Frame rates also increased slightly, by around 1-5fps, in most of the games I play.
Plus, the difference between playing a game without and then with EAX is substantial. The echo, reverb and occlusion effects are sexy.....

[Tamren]

So if DF does run multiple threads, will 4 cores be better than 2? For DF and or for general use?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

In theory 4 cores will not give a very significant boost over 2 if DF only runs two threads at any time. DF will basically get full run of two of the cores while everything else is pushed off to the other ones. Generally you probably have DF be the big CPU hog on the computer anyway, so the actual amount of performance gained will be fairly little. If you feel it's important, you could always ask Toady very, very nicely to see if he'd be willing to take some time in the future to increase the amount of multithreading DF does so that it can fully utilize multicore processors.

As upgrades go, I'll share my computer upgrade for the new Dwarf Fortress version: Parallels Desktop 3.0. I run DF (and LCS) on my Mac, and it runs slooow. Because DF is a Windows program and there is no Mac port at the moment. I pull every trick in the book to get it to squeak out 30fps. With that upgrade, which includes full 3D hardware acceleration for Windows programs, speed increase for DF is 100-200%. It also includes various other incredible awesomeness that has to be seen to be believed, but I will resist going into an infomercial for them.  

[Tamren]

Ah in that case 4 would be ideal because DF can hog 2 of them and the rest of the computer can manage easily on the remaining 2 cores.

Thing is, twice the cores means something like twice the heat. If i got the Antec Nine Hundred cooling will probably not be an issue but in general can you rely on stock fans?