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#21
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
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. |
#22
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
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. |
#23
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
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 |
#24
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs.Quad-Core Q6600
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 |
#25
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs.Quad-Core Q6600
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 |
#26
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
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. |
#27
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
"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... |
#28
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
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 |
#29
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
"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. |
#30
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
John Weiss wrote:
"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! IMHO sometimes it is a bad time to buy. February should bring a next generation of Intel cpu's and quite possibly lower prices. "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... |
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