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

"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!
JLC

"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

"JLC" jc@nospam wrote in message news
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.

Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!

wrote in message t...
Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!

Oh wait, never mind:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-5.html

"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

One area that well often benefit from some form of
distributed processing is, video processing. There
are many who wouldn't think of creating a "render
farm" but would be glad if they could have access
to some of the benefits of such a setup. A Quad-
core approach may just match the scale and needs
of the home video Editor, at this time.

Luck;
Ken

wrote:
"JLC" jc@nospam wrote in message news
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.

Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!



Sadly, no rig yet runs Crysis at 1600x1200 with high IQ and sustained
FPS that we have come to expect.

But we still have reviews which hem and haw and measure low resolutions
and minimal IQ settings, as if to try and trick us into thinking we are
going to get a "next-gen" experience.

FarCry ran well enough at low resolutions with the 6800GT it was bundled
with, even better with the 7800GT that came out the year after, today
you can run two copies of FarCry on a dual core, 8800GT PC simultaneously.

So, we patiently wait on the next batch of hardware (which will likely
be two 8800GTs on one board) to see if Crysis will be playable at
1600x1200. Farcry was a exciting game and I'm sure Crysis (FarCry2) will
be worth the wait.

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.

I'm definitely running several apps at once, which is what makes this
decision tricky

Kind Regards,

Matt

"M" == Matt writes:
M I'm definitely running several apps at once, which is what
M makes this decision tricky

Only if your apps *use the cpu actively* (say 30% or greater). At the
moment my machine has--let me check--76 processes, but I'm using only
about 5-10% total cpu time (on a dual-core AMD).
--
A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can't afford an air force.
~ William Blum

"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.

--
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?"
-Mark Twain

"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