Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600

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.

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