My PC is painfully and slowly dying. My budget isn't worked out for a new PC but I think I could squeeze out about $500 or so. I have been searching for a new one (I currently have an AMD Athlon II x4 quad 630) it's about 4 years old. I have seen Intel i3 and some Quad-core AMD's in my preferred price range and some 6 and 8 core AMD's. I am ignorant to how's these work these days as it's been 7 years since I have worked in the tech field. Would there be a benefit to having 6 or 8 cores? Would X3 even make use of the extra cores?
 
Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated
 

My new machine has an inexpensive entry-level AMD FX-6300. 6 cores. SONAR uses all of 'em. It's working well: I've got a project with 43 tracks and 8 sampled instruments and the CPU's only at 20%. 

Well this will get moved to the computer forum, but I just built what you see in my signature and including a good case, power supply, W8.1 , DVD drive etc it was just around $800. So $500 can get you into a pretty good i5 Set up if you don't need the other stuff. I think my MOBO, Prosessor and Memory was about that. 
 
Here was my thread on my build:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/New-Build-for-my-Silverstone-case-m3103014.aspx
 

SONAR will use as many cores as it sees.
 
I moved this to the Computer forum because you will get better computer hardware specific answers there.
 

Thank you all for your comments. Sorry I put it in the wrong category.

bitflipper
My new machine has an inexpensive entry-level AMD FX-6300. 6 cores. SONAR uses all of 'em. It's working well: I've got a project with 43 tracks and 8 sampled instruments and the CPU's only at 20%. 

When you say sampled instruments you mean addictive drums, dimension etc? 

Sonar will use all the cores it can have, but AMD processors don't compete that will against Intel, power wise. At a given clock speed Intel CPUs use less energy and do more work.
 
Now if you find a good price on an AMD chip then cool, but just understand that they are not up to par with Intel chips overall.
 
Like their new 8 core chips aren't really 8 cores by conventional reckoning. They are sort of a Hyper threading+ model. They have 4 modules, but in each module some things are doubled for 8 cores, and others are shared. They are not the same as Intel's (much more expensive) 8 core chips which are 8 full cores.

When you say sampled instruments you mean addictive drums, dimension etc?

Yes. In my case it's Superior Drummer, Omnisphere and Kontakt. But yeh, it could as easily be Addictive Drums, Dim Pro and SI-Bass.
 
Sycraft's right, AMD chips don't perform as well as Intel. However, the price difference is pretty significant. My motherboard (without CPU) is $58 on NewEgg.

Basically AMD chips are a good buy if you don't mind the power consumption (and for the lower end parts it isn't a huge deal) and you can get them for a good deal. Not trying to talk you out of one, just making sure you understand what you are getting in to. I've seen people on gaming forums that think a $230 Vishera chip is better than a $1000 Haswell-E because "Vishera has 8 cores and is clocked higher," when in reality the Haswell-E is waaay faster (as you'd hope for the money).
 
You can see it in things like game requirements. Dragon Age Inquisition asks for a quad core Intel at 3 GHz or a six core AMD at 3.2GHz.

Been using an ASRock board for 3 years with a phenom x3, 2800, overclocked to 3200.
Recently put in a phenom x4, 3000, OC at 3600.
This "cheap" board has lots of OC settings for cpu, board, ram,... Easy to play.
 
Got a large ninja heat-sink, 120mm fan, cpu temp at about 35 at idle, max use of 96 watts.
 
Got an amd based fanless vid card.
 
8 gig g.skills ram
 
The case-fan died last week. Temps are all within optimal range. Using speedfan to check.
 
I have projects that are 60+ tracks with dozens of effects, DP, zeta, SD,...
 
The biggest problem is with the aging audio card not getting new drivers. So the midi part occasionally poops sonar.
 
Been using mostly amd for last 12+ years.