Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-CoreQ6600

"Bob Fry" wrote in message
...
"KM" == Ken Maltby writes:

KM One area that well often benefit from some form of
KM distributed processing is, video processing.

One form of distributed processing used for many years is--using a
graphics card. For the home user, even video processing is better
handled using a good graphics card. Graphics processors are simply
very specialized vectorized processors, far more efficient than trying
to do the same thing with a general purpose cpu.


The video processing that I was referring to is not something
accomplished by the GPU of the normal video card. Except
for special hardware encoder cards ( Like Matrox's Real Time
cards) used during the editing and encoding of video; the software
editing programs rendering and encoding is done using the CPU or
CPUs when more than one is available. The time this adds to the
process of editing and authoring DVDs has always been a great
aggravation, and improvements in this area are very sought after.
The traditional approach, of those with the budget, has included
creation of a render farm, made up of many computers linked
together and all working on parts of the rendering or encoding
of the video.

Luck;
Ken

Somewhere on teh intarweb "JLC" typed:
"John Weiss" wrote in message
. ..
"Matt" wrote...
Hey guys. I'm looking at upgrading my PC and I've come across an
interesting problem:

- Pay £165 for a Intel Dual Core E6850 (clocked @ 3.0GHz)

- Pay £160 for a Quad Core Q6600 (clocked @ 2.4GHz)


Right now it's a coin toss, and depends a lot on your personal usage.

As Patrick pointed out, if you join any of the distributed computing
projects, the quad wins, because they have SMP clients that will
fully use all 4 cores. Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu) is
my favorite DC project, but there are a couple other worthy ones out
there. For single-threaded apps, though, the higher clock speed of the
6850
wins. Once you offload background apps like antivirus, firewall, etc
to another core, your foreground app can take full advantage of the
clock speed of the remaining core.

If you're a gamer, more of them are coming out that are
multi-threaded, but I don't know how many of them will take
advantage of more than 2 cores.

I went for the 6850. If I decide a quad will work better in the
future, when the clock speed is up and the price down, I can upgrade
with a simple CPU swap.

I also installed a E6850 last month. I had a E6600 and just wanted to
have a 3GHz set of chips without having to overclock. It's true that
when running synthetic benchmarks and some hard core real world apps
the quad cores score higher. But for gaming (which is pretty much
what I do with my PC) There's still not that many games that make
good use of two cores let alone 4. As for all the guys I've heard
talking about how Crysis makes use of a quad IMOH I think that they're
misinformed. It's true that at some point in the games development
Crytex said it was going to optimized the game for quad cores, but I
also read that this was dropped in the end. When I bought my CPU I
was trying to get the best GPU&CPU combo for Crysis (and other new
games as well!) and I found this
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html to be very
interesting. As you can clearly see the game is much more dependent
on the GPU then the CPU. For me going from the 2.4GHz to 3Ghz in
Crysis did nothing. I ran the in game BM and got the exact same
score. 41FPS avg with all settings set to High no AA and 8xAF with V
sync on. If I turned V sync off I got the same score. My GPU is a XFX
8800GT XXX which comes with it's core clocked at 670
and the shaders clocked a little higher then standard.
I do enjoy my E6850. I do notice that apps run faster, but as far as
gaming goes the load times are about the only thing I really notice
being faster. But Like I said I just wanted to have a 3GHz CPU!

Me too! However, I don't have your money so I bought an E4500 and it's
humming along nicely at (413 x 8) 3.3GHz, air-cooled, quietly and without
fuss.

My friends Q6600 is running at 3.2GHz on air and is borderline on the temps
on a hot day. Over 25°C hotter than mine. For day-to-day use they're
indistinguishable in terms of responsiveness.
--
Shaun.

Somewhere on teh intarweb "Brian Cryer" typed:
"Matt" wrote in message
...
Hey guys. I'm looking at upgrading my PC and I've come across an
interesting problem:

- Pay £165 for a Intel Dual Core E6850 (clocked @ 3.0GHz)

- Pay £160 for a Quad Core Q6600 (clocked @ 2.4GHz)

Now to my untrained eye, the quad-core seems like an easy choice. Am
I correct, or is the performance benefit from the 2 additional cores
completely lost by the low bandwidth connection between the 2 dies,
as mentioned in a Wikipedia article below:

"A quad-core CPU (as a two-die set in particular), however, can
rarely double the processing ability of each of its constituent
halves (e.g. the Kentsfield rarely doubles the ability of the
Conroe), due to a loss
of performance resulting from connecting them (i.e. sharing the
narrow memory bandwidth, and operating system overhead of handling
twice as many cores and threads)."

Will all applications for Windows eventually become multi-threaded
and fully utilise a quad core setup? Because if so then surely the
2.4GHz quad core would outperform the 3.0GHz dual core in the future?

Basically this comes down to dual core vs. quad core, and I'm hoping
there's a clear consensus about which to buy!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000942.html seems to
provide an interesting view on this - just one that stood out when I
did a google just now.

Most of the time my pc (single core) is idle, and waiting for me to do
something. I do run some cpu intensive applications where I'm left
waiting for my pc, but most of the time my pc is idle. To be honest
most applications can't even take advantage of dual core.

Maybe so but I do like the fact that I can have my dual-core PC doing
something heavy-duty like encoding and still have it responsive and snappy
if I want to check email etc. Encoding on my old single-core was an
overnight job as the PC was useless for anything else once I hit "start".
--
Shaun.

Its only
those applications that are inherently multi-threaded (or which can
be made so) like databases, webservers, some games, that will be able
to truly take advantage of the move from two to four cores. Whilst
the number of applications that will be able to make use of multiple
cores will inevitably increase, is it something that you need?

Despite all this, my plans are for my next pc to be quad core, and
given the choice that's what I'd go for even if the clock speed is
slower. Whatever you do be sure to chock it full of as much RAM as
you can, ie 4GB if you are using a 32bit OS.

Hope this is useful.

What about the new Intel Penryn range due out soon. Have you considered one
of them?


"Matt" wrote in message
...
Hey guys. I'm looking at upgrading my PC and I've come across an
interesting problem:

- Pay £165 for a Intel Dual Core E6850 (clocked @ 3.0GHz)

- Pay £160 for a Quad Core Q6600 (clocked @ 2.4GHz)

Now to my untrained eye, the quad-core seems like an easy choice. Am I
correct, or is the performance benefit from the 2 additional cores
completely lost by the low bandwidth connection between the 2 dies, as
mentioned in a Wikipedia article below:

"A quad-core CPU (as a two-die set in particular), however, can rarely
double the processing ability of each of its constituent halves (e.g.
the Kentsfield rarely doubles the ability of the Conroe), due to a
loss
of performance resulting from connecting them (i.e. sharing the narrow
memory bandwidth, and operating system overhead of handling twice as
many cores and threads)."

Will all applications for Windows eventually become multi-threaded and
fully utilise a quad core setup? Because if so then surely the 2.4GHz
quad core would outperform the 3.0GHz dual core in the future?

Basically this comes down to dual core vs. quad core, and I'm hoping
there's a clear consensus about which to buy!

Kind Regards,

Matt

Maybe so but I do like the fact that I can have my dual-core PC doing
something heavy-duty like encoding and still have it responsive and snappy
if I want to check email etc. Encoding on my old single-core was an
overnight job as the PC was useless for anything else once I hit "start".

Exactly.

Kind Regards,

Matt

Fred wrote:
What about the new Intel Penryn range due out soon. Have you considered one
of them?

I haven't heard about them, however won't a new CPU be considerably
more expensive for the first few months of its life?

Kind Regards,

Matt

In article ,
Ken Maltby wrote:

"Bob Fry" wrote in message
...
"KM" == Ken Maltby writes:

KM One area that well often benefit from some form of
KM distributed processing is, video processing.

One form of distributed processing used for many years is--using a
graphics card. For the home user, even video processing is better
handled using a good graphics card. Graphics processors are simply
very specialized vectorized processors, far more efficient than trying
to do the same thing with a general purpose cpu.


The video processing that I was referring to is not something
accomplished by the GPU of the normal video card. Except
for special hardware encoder cards ( Like Matrox's Real Time
cards) used during the editing and encoding of video; the software
editing programs rendering and encoding is done using the CPU or
CPUs when more than one is available. The time this adds to the
process of editing and authoring DVDs has always been a great
aggravation, and improvements in this area are very sought after.
The traditional approach, of those with the budget, has included
creation of a render farm, made up of many computers linked
together and all working on parts of the rendering or encoding
of the video.

While I don't have extensive experience in this field, I _have_ 'recoded'
a few DVDs from 4.7+ GB to exactly 4.7GB using 'Nero Recode', and I
noticed this tool makes use of all 4 cores on my Q6600. So this is one
area where a Quad-Core will significantly outperform a Dual-Core CPU. See
also the equivalent Benchmarks on, for instance, Tom's Hardware site, the
CPU overview.

Beyond that, I thought long and hard about the Q6600 vs the E6850 since
they were, give or take a few EUROs, exactly the same price when I was
putting together my new 'Game-Rig'. After reading some articles about
upcoming 3D engines, I decided I would take the gamble of going for the
slower-clocked Quad-Core vs the Higher-Clocked Dual-Core. Time will tell
if I made the right choice, but the Q6600 is certainly a lot of (perhaps
theoretical) horsepower compared to an E6850.

So if a lot of these get sold and are in the market, developers will
notice this (see for instance Valve's periodical HW survey via Steam) and
hopefully make use of this extra horsepower.

Regards,

Patrick.

"Fred" wrote...
What about the new Intel Penryn range due out soon. Have you considered
one of them?

If you always wait to consider a computer part "due out soon," you'll never
buy ANYTHING!

"Consider" what's available now, but with an eye to upgradability (when the
now-future stuff is available and cheaper). P35 and X38 chipsets should
accommodate the 45nm stuff coming out...

Matt wrote:
Fred wrote:
What about the new Intel Penryn range due out soon. Have you
considered one of them?

I haven't heard about them, however won't a new CPU be considerably
more expensive for the first few months of its life?

Intel were supposed to be releasing a new range of cpu's based on a 45nm
manufacturing process next Monday but it looks like they have delayed things
for a month or two.
The new range offer similar performance at corresponding frequencies to what
is currently available but with lower power consumption.
The current range is expected to be phased out over the next 12 months
One major difference will be a new SSE4.1 instruction set that will speed up
video work in supported applications.
As far as prices go I remember the last product release changed what was the
best bang for buck in the Intel range.
For a general idea of what is on offer visit this translated page.
http://66.249.91.104/translate_c?hl=...171%26page%3D1

"Bob Fry" wrote in message
...
"M" == Matt writes:

M Will all applications for Windows eventually become
M multi-threaded and fully utilise a quad core setup?

Sure. About the time Windows itself becomes stable and bug-free.

What sort of apps are you running? At the moment, off-hand I think
only very specialized parallelized, shared-memory numerical apps will
truly take advantage of multiple cores. Or if you are running several
apps at a time that use cpu then multiple cores will help. Otherwise
I'd go for the faster clock rate.
--
The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out
and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.
~ Mark Twain

Have a look at this comparison:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...uad-q6600.html

and this one:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/int...spx?i=3038&p=8

Sorry if someone already mentionned this.