I decided to go through Dell, just makes my life easier.

I think I narrowed it down to what I want. Take a look see if this is a viable system.

Dell Inspiron 530 Pirce 879$ includes Monitor(-200ish=679$ for comp)
Intel

I decided to go through Dell, just makes my life easier.

I think I narrowed it down to what I want. Take a look see if this is a viable system.

Dell Inspiron 530 Pirce 879$ includes Monitor(-200ish=679$ for comp)
Intel

Again cutting me off...

I decided to go through Dell, just makes my life easier.

I think I narrowed it down to what I want. Take a look see if this is a viable system.

Dell Inspiron 530 Pirce 879$ includes Monitor(-200ish=679$ for comp)
Intel Core2 Duo Processor E8300 (6MB L2 Cache,2.83GHz,1333FSB)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 4DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 128MB (only offer ATI...)

I know the video card isn't insane but like I said the most graphical intense thing I do is play eq, should that be sufficient? These are the other 2 options
ATI Radeon HD3650 256MB [add $40 or $1/month1]
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB [add $90 or $3/month1]

Question: I have done a little homework on this but still not sure
which is better, faster duo, or slower quad. I am not sure I use
anything that would really make any use of the quad.
Intel Core2 Duo Processor E8300 (6MB L2 Cache,2.83GHz,1333FSB) [Included in Price]

Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB) [add $50 or $1/month1]
Dell Recommends

What do you guys think?

The Intel Core2 Duo Processor E8300 is a better proc IMO. I have quads and a T9300, and for video encoding the quad is better, but for EQ, the faster dual core proc is my choice. I'm running a T9300 and a Gforce 8800 GTS on my laptop and cannot believe the speed.

Regarding the graphics, the better card is always better then a slightly faster CPU, unless the CPU bottlenecks the GPU. In your case, I would go for the ATI Radeon HD3650 256MB .

GeorgeS

What about if I will also be using the comp to run a server? Is there any natural advantage to having the 2.4 quad over a 3.0 duo?

I am not positive, but I would guess that the server would run best on less cores. It may only use one at a time, so having the fastest speed per CPU would probably be better than having more CPUs with a higher total speed if you know what I mean.

So, a AMD 6400+ X2 that runs 2 cores at 3200 would probably be better than a Quad Core 8000+ that ran each core at 2000 (just made the second CPU stats up).

I run my server on a single core 3700+ atm and it handles well. But, unless you are expecting to have hundreds of players on your server, any new CPU should work just fine. The most important part is RAM and with 4GBs, you should have nothing to worry about :)