Verified answer

If 2.7 GHz dual core is quoted a minimum requirement, I'm guessing they mean a Pentium D or similar. The Pentium D is a dual core variant of the Pentium 4.

The Intel Core series is much faster than Pentium 4 even at lower clock speeds, so a Core 2 Duo (or Quad) 2.4 GHz is much, much faster than a 2.7 GHz Pentium D.

The reason I'm quoting Intel CPUs is that I'm guessing yours is the very popular Core 2 Quad Q6600, which runs at 2.4 GHz. To my knowledge there aren't any games that won't run on it yet.

The same thing applies to both Intel and AMD processors: The newer architectures are usually much faster than the old ones, so just quoting the clock speed can be very misleading! Game publishers should list actual CPUs in their system requirements, not just a random GHz number that doesn't make sense.

Thats right, dual core is the latest modern processor along with core 2 quad, in theory the more cores a cpu has, the better the overall performance. The reality though, is that a dual core chip will suffice because few applications and games can make use of processors with 4 cores( quad -core ).

Buy a Intel core 2 duo at 2.7ghz, as a rule the higher the frquency ( the GHZ) number the faster the processor, but this doesn't apply when comparing AMD with Intel processors or comparing with older generations of processors but this isn't the case here.

Hope this helps.

A multi-core CPU (or chip-level multiprocessor, CMP) combines two or more independent cores into a single package composed of a single integrated circuit (IC), called a die, or more dies packaged together. A dual-core processor contains two cores, and a quad-core processor contains four cores. A multi-core microprocessor implements multiprocessing in a single physical package. A processor with all cores on a single die is called a monolithic processor. Cores in a multicore device may share a single coherent cache at the highest on-device cache level (e.g. L2 for the Intel Core 2) or may have separate caches (e.g. current AMD dual-core processors). The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. Each "core" independently implements optimizations such as superscalar execution, pipelining, and multithreading. A system with n cores is effective when it is presented with n or more threads concurrently. The most commercially significant (or at least the most 'obvious') multi-core processors are those used in personal computers (primarily from Intel and AMD) and game consoles (e.g., the eight-core Cell processor in the PS3 and the three-core Xenon processor in the Xbox 360). In this context, "multi" typically means a relatively small number of cores. However, the technology is widely used in other technology areas, especially those of embedded processors, such as network processors and digital signal processors, and in GPUs.

The amount of performance gained by the use of a multicore processor depends on the problem being solved and the algorithms used, as well as their implementation in software (Amdahl's law). For so-called "embarrassingly parallel" problems, a dual-core processor with two cores at 2GHz may perform very nearly as fast as a single core of 4GHz.[1] Other problems though may not yield so much speedup. This all assumes however that the software has been designed to take advantage of available parallelism. If it hasn't, there will not be any speedup at all. However, the processor will multitask better since it can run two programs at once, one on each core.

well quad core and dual core are just physically "single" processors but "multiple" inside.

2.4 quad core is about above average for games nowadays

Quad Core :D

Ditto here, game dictated 2.4 GHz single core but running it 2.01 GHz dual core fine.

I don't get what dual core or quad core means but I do know that I have got a game which requires 3.6ghz and I have less than 3.6ghz (I think I've got 3.2) and that game still works... So your game should work too