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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
"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 |
#2
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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. |
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-CoreQ6600
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". I find myself in exactly the same position as the original poster. I've found the same problem with single-core video encoding, but how to decide between dual and quad core? With quad would I be able to do some dvd compression, burn a dvd, encode some wavs to mp3, and still have a responsive pc to do some text editing, web browsing, etc.? In other words would each of the processor intensive tasks get assigned a core and stick with it? What about the OS, do I need 64bit xp or vista with dual/quad processing? I've heard that if you get 4GB RAM, a 64bit OS is recommended - is that true. Thanks all. |
#4
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-CoreQ6600
Matthew wrote:
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". I find myself in exactly the same position as the original poster. I've found the same problem with single-core video encoding, but how to decide between dual and quad core? With quad would I be able to do some dvd compression, burn a dvd, encode some wavs to mp3, and still have a responsive pc to do some text editing, web browsing, etc.? In other words would each of the processor intensive tasks get assigned a core and stick with it? What about the OS, do I need 64bit xp or vista with dual/quad processing? I've heard that if you get 4GB RAM, a 64bit OS is recommended - is that true. Thanks all. you don't need a 64bit O/S to use either a dual core ore Quad core cpu however you are correct if you intend to use 4gb or more Ram then a 64bit O/S is recommended as it will be able to address all the memory available where as 32bit xp/vista will have some issues past 3gb depending on the motherboard and memory set-up you may see just over 3.5Gb using a 32bit O/S |
#5
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Should I go Dual Core or Quad Core? Intel C2 DUO E6850 vs. Quad-Core Q6600
On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:37:45 GMT, Matthew
wrote: 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". I find myself in exactly the same position as the original poster. I've found the same problem with single-core video encoding, but how to decide between dual and quad core? You don't need either, just go into Task Manager, right-click on the list item using the processor time, and set it's priority to "low". It's largely a myth that anything that isn't realtime needs more than one processor (core). In some cases the application doing the encoding even lets you set it's process priority ahead of time so it's always what you want... and IMO most people will want "low", even if they had a dual core or quad system. With quad would I be able to do some dvd compression, burn a dvd, encode some wavs to mp3, and still have a responsive pc to do some text editing, web browsing, etc.? In other words would each of the processor intensive tasks get assigned a core and stick with it? The answer is that you will have more processes running than cores even with a quad core. Seldom do people want to consider this truth. Adding more cores does give the system more processing power in general when more than one process is linearlly bound instead of just idling away most of the time. Yes once a process is assigned to a core it will continue using it. What remains is as mentioned above, that with more than 4 processes whether your system remains responsive for what you are doing in the foreground depends on that task running at higher priority than what is running in the background. Merely putting the app in focus by using it does elevate the priority but not necessarily enough in some cases. I'm not trying to talk you out of a faster new dual or quad core system, I'm just saying for years I had no problem using a single core to do video encoding or the other things you list in the background while the system was fully responsive for text editing or web, email, etc in the foreground. With a good dual or quad core what you get is the background linear processor consumer jobs get done a lot faster. What about the OS, do I need 64bit xp or vista with dual/quad processing? I've heard that if you get 4GB RAM, a 64bit OS is recommended - is that true. Your applications and drivers are the other factor to consider, 64bit OS is not needed for dual or quad core processors. |
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