M6400 Processor choices

I'm trying to decide which processor and OS (Vista 32 or 64) to go with. The quad cores are 2.5Ghz I believe, and I just haven't seen anything showing an advantage for quad cores outside of 3D rendering applications. Anyone have some good hard information on this? For my personal situation, I plan to use the notebook for the following:

App Dev using Visual Studio 08, SQL 05 & 08, Expression
Design/Illustration/Photo using CS3 tools, eventually CS4, Lightroom, rare 3D in Blender.
Gaming to include Farcry, WoW, Neverwinternights, others?

Right now it seems that the quad core will draw more power for almost no performance increase, and in some cases it will perform *worse* than the core duo at a higher clock (say, T9600). I'm not sure how far into the future it will be before a 2.5ghz quad can outperform a 2.8ghz duo in most use cases? Anyone?

On the OS, how are people feeling about 64bit? For all my day to day involvement in the "latest and greatest" in software dev, I still haven't made the move to 64bit.

TIA, and would this question be better in a different forum?

 

I think that many apps haven't taken advantage of DUAL cores appropriately yet, let alone quad cores. I work mostly with MATLAB, and on a dual-core my CPU usage is VERY rarely above 50%.

So, in my opinion, quad-cores are not worth it yet, unless you really don't care about battery duration at all.

As for the OS, how much RAM are you planning to put on your laptop, and how much RAM do you usually need when doing those tasks? If they are RAM intensive (it looks like they are), you should consider getting 8 GB of RAM (probably after buying the laptop, it's way cheaper) and a 64-bit OS to take advantage of that. A 32-bit OS is limited to around 3.2-3.5 GB of RAM. Is that enough for you?

 

I plan to start at 4GB RAM and go up from there. The more the better for me. I tend to keep a lot of apps up at once, and some of them eat a lot of memory.

The only thing that has kept me from 64bit so far is that I don't know if all the software is ready. I've seen servers run worse under 64 bit OS/Apps. We found a bug in Analysis Server 64bit a year or two back that would let AS page out the operating system. Not so good for the server I think things a probably a little more stable now tho.