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

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

In article ,
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)

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!

I had the same decision to make, and I went with the Q6600. At the very
least Crysis detects and uses the 4 cores. SetiBOINC also runs very nicely
using 4 cores.

Regards, Patrick.

"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.

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008 06:02:06 -0800 (PST), 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)

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!



All depends on what you're doing, I suspect. I'd take the dual core
because most of what I do isn't cpu intensive.

"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. 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.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian

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)

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

Is the decision easier to make, if you overclock the Q6600 to 3GHz ?
The G0 stepping seems to overclock pretty well.

Paul

All depends on what you're doing, I suspect. I'd take the dual core
because most of what I do isn't cpu intensive.


Thanks for the replies guys.

Most of what I do is work or play games on my PC, so there are times
when it is idle. The thing is I'm upgrading because I want my PC to
perform well at the times when it isn't idle.

I'm also thinking about the future. Four or five years ago when I
bought my XP2000+ CPU it could cope with anything I threw at it, but
now it even struggles when I'm multi-tasking with lots of web browser
tabs, e-mail client etc. running. So getting a CPU that will perform
well now just now, but in the future is paramount.

Multithreaded applications may be scarce at the moment, but in say 2
years time won't every single application I use be ulitising every
available core my CPU has?

Kind Regards,

Matt

"Matt" wrote...

Multithreaded applications may be scarce at the moment, but in say 2
years time won't every single application I use be ulitising every
available core my CPU has?

Are you going to spend the $$ to upgrade all the software to the multithreaded
versions?

Will you still be using the same machine in 2 years? Will there be a Q6800 at 3
or 3.4 GHz available?

Since the price is the same, decide on what will be more useful to you NOW and
in the near future.

Patrick Vervoorn wrote:
-SNIP-
I had the same decision to make, and I went with the Q6600. At the very
least Crysis detects and uses the 4 cores. SetiBOINC also runs very nicely
using 4 cores.

Regards, Patrick.


I have a Q6600 G0 stepping and it easily overclocks to 3,0 GHZ.
Mine is set at 3.25GHZ now and is limited by my memory\FSB frequency
I believe. At 3.25 Ghz it is stable and temperatures never get
anywhere near the upper limits.

Paul

Are you going to spend the $$ to upgrade all the software to the multithreaded
versions?

Given I can get software on student licences, in all likelihood yes
whe my budget allows.

Will you still be using the same machine in 2 years?

Definitely.

Will there be a Q6800 at 3 or 3.4 GHz available?

Good point, but that will require further expense.

Since the price is the same, decide on what will be more useful to you NOW and
in the near future.

Now is clearly the E6850, as I'm not keen on overclocking due to the
noise consequences of having loads of massive fans around my case;
even though the Q6600 has the potential to reach 3GHz itself. It just
depends how quickly multi-threaded applications (and will all multi-
threaded support quad as well as dual core, or will that come later?)
are introduced.

Kind Regards,

Matt