In news:alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64, Yousuf Khan
posted on Sat, 29 Dec 2012 01:03:08 -0500 the
following:

Well, the more cores there are, the more heat the chip overall
generates. They attempt to stay within a certain power consumption
window with these chips, for example 95W. A chip with only 4 cores will
be consuming less power overall, therefore its clock can be cranked up a
bit more and it can still stay within the 95W power limits, than a chip
with 6 or 8 cores.

Now as for the 6 & 8 core chips having the same base frequency of
3.5GHz, I'm willing to bet that the 6-core has a slightly higher turbo
frequency than the 8-core.

The six-core turbo speed is 100 MHz faster than one of the eight-core
turbo speeds, but the other eight-core turbo speed is 100MHz faster than
the six-core turbo speed. The list is below:

Here's a list of the four Vishera AM3+ CPUs from the Newegg.com website:

AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core
AMD FX-8320 Vishera 3.5GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core
AMD FX-6300 Vishera 3.5GHz (4.1GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Six-Core
AMD FX-4300 Vishera 3.8GHz (4.0GHz [Turbo]) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core

The turbo frequencies are a temporarily higher frequency that can be
applied to one or two cores at a time as the need arises, so those
cores would be running faster than the base frequency. Without looking
it up, I'm betting that the turbo frequency of the 8 core would be
4.0GHz, while the turbo frequency of the 6 core would be about 200Mhz
more at 4.2GHz. That's again because a 6 core would be generating less
heat than the 8 core, so it can have a higher turbo speed.

As long as the factory heatsink and the heat transfer material they apply
to it works, I'm happy. I have a little vial of Arctic Silver, however,
that I used on my still-older computer, an Abit KT7A-RAID machine. But
once I put a heatsink on, I don't like to take it off unless I just have
to. If a six-core processor really is a defective eight-core processor,
maybe they shipped it with a heatsink and thermal compound that's also
suited for an eight-core processor. My dual-core machine had no heat
issues with the CPU whatsoever, and I just left the factory thermal pad do
what it was designed to do. Since I won't be overclocking, I'm planning
to do the same with the new build.

Damaeus posted:

Is a Six-Core at 3.5 Ghz going to be faster, overall, than a Quad-Core
running 3.8 Ghz?

It depends on your workload. If you have a lot of programs running in
the background, then the more cores there are, the better. If on the
other hand, you just want your foreground program to run at its fastest
possible speed, then it's likely that a lesser number of cores with
faster cores might be the better way to go.

I see the point now. I don't typically do a LOT of multitasking, but
sometimes I do. I do play some Facebook games, and those are amazingly
processor-intensive. I know it ran my dual-core processor fluctuating
between 35% and 60%, even more than Final Fantasy XI, which is a real,
full-screen video game.

As for Facebook games, sometimes I like to have a couple or three games
running in different tabs in the browser. I imagine more cores will come
in handy just for that alone. This single-core processor will barely run
one game at a time, and it doesn't do that well. What flows like
chocolate syrup on my friend's computer looks like a stuttering annoyance
on this machine. My old dual-core ran the same games even more fluidly
than my friend's computer, and they're both dual-cores. Mine had a
dedicated GeForce 7950GTOC, while his is an integrated Intel G31/33
integrated in the motherboard's chipset. His won't even display Farmville
2 properly. Many of the Farmville 2 game elements are completely missing
on his, both static elements and animations.

On this single-core machine, there's one game that even causes my mouse to
intermittently hang just because of a Flash advertisement running on the
same web page.

Still, just the fact that each core runs at 3.5GHz core is still going to
be better than the 2.2 GHz dual-core it's really replacing, not counting
this dreadful single-core 1.83 GHz one. If I had it to do over again, I
might have just gone with the quad-core after all I've learned. But I
figured that since the six-core was only ten dollars more, why not go for
it. Hopefully it'll just work as it's supposed to without giving me any
problems. I'm sure it'll be generally faster and I will still be happy
with it since it'll be faster than the rig that died, and much faster than
this piece of garbage I'm using now. This would make a fine dedicated
word processor and web browser, but it's not even fit for the simplest
browser games.

Damaeus