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

[Strobe]

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

Note, it has to be apps that can use several cores at once.
Most older apps were written to run only on a single CPU - they just
don't have the first clue as to how to use any extra cores.

The current version of BOINC (the distributed processing manager) can allocate
separate tasks to as many cores as you want, and I believe newer Photoshops
will automatically shift some chores to your extra cores if they're idle.

Designing SW to split processing between cores isn't simple - the coder has to
make sure all the threads stay synchronised so that time isn't wasted waiting
for an errant sub-thread to finish. There was an early real-time multi-procesor
system that worked well (Sperry Scamp?) but had to spend a significant percent
of its time polling adjacent CPUs for new results.

I expect the most aggressive use of multiprocessing will - of course - be with
games.

 

[Ken Maltby]

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

 

[~misfit~]

Somewhere on teh intarweb "JLC" typed:

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.

 

[~misfit~]

Somewhere on teh intarweb "Brian Cryer" typed:

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".

 

[Fred]

What about the new Intel Penryn range due out soon. Have you considered one
of them?


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

 

[Matt]

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

 

[Matt]

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

 

[Patrick Vervoorn]

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.

 

[John Weiss]

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...

 

[Fred]

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=en&langpair=zh|en&u=http://www.hkepc.com/?id=171&page=1

 

[Baudouin de Spa]

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.

Have a look at this comparison:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q6600.html

and this one:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3038&p=8

Sorry if someone already mentionned this.

 

[Fred]

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.

 

[Frank McCoy]

IMHO sometimes it is a bad time to buy.
February should bring a next generation of Intel cpu's and quite possibly
lower prices.

There's the new AMD quad-cores out right now ....

 

[Fred]

There's the new AMD quad-cores out right now ....

True and from what I have read the reason Intel have delayed their launch of
the new range is because of the hardware bug in the AMD quad-cores.
It must make the AMD offering less of a threat to their market share.

Erratum degrades Phenom 9500, 9600 performance
http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/13724

 

[Patrick Vervoorn]

[snip]

Have a look at this comparison:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q6600.html

and this one:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3038&p=8

Sorry if someone already mentionned this.

Not that I know. It's also comparisons like these (but not these
specifcally) which I ran into when researching myself a few months ago,
that prompted me to buy a Q6600 instead of an E6850.

Of course, all depends on future games and/or game-engines supporting more
than 2 cores. If they do (and if the Q6600 has been sold a lot of times
that will help), then the Q6600 will be the better long-term choice than
the E6850.

Short-term the E6850 is probably the faster choice, so if you expect or
are planning to swap out your CPU in about half a year, then perhaps
that's the better choice.

Regards, Patrick.

 

[Matt]

Short-term the E6850 is probably the faster choice, so if you expect or

are planning to swap out your CPU in about half a year, then perhaps
that's the better choice.

I would say I'm open to swapping the CPU I get for a new one in the
future, but not that soon.

Basically, if I can overclock the Q6600 to 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz FSB,
using only the stock cooler, without reducing the life of the chip; then
I will get the Q6600.

Is this possible?

Kind Regards,

Matt

 

[John Weiss]

Basically, if I can overclock the Q6600 to 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz FSB, using
only the stock cooler, without reducing the life of the chip; then I will get
the Q6600.

Is this possible?

You'll have to monitor the temps and decide whether you can live with the
increase. You'll also have to find out if the system is stable at that speed.

While it is "possible," I believe there is significant risk that it might not
work well in any random system. If the case and gfx cooling are top-notch, you
may have a better chance of success. If either are marginal, leaving too much
heat inside the case, it probably won't work.

Also, remember that this is winter. If your room is significantly warmer in the
summer, factor that in your assessment...

 

[Phil Weldon]

'Matt' wrote:
| I would say I'm open to swapping the CPU I get for a new one in the
| future, but not that soon.
|
| Basically, if I can overclock the Q6600 to 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz FSB,
| using only the stock cooler, without reducing the life of the chip; then
| I will get the Q6600.
|
| Is this possible?
_____

Yes. See alt.comp.hardware.overclocking .

Phil Weldon

|> Short-term the E6850 is probably the faster choice, so if you expect or
| > are planning to swap out your CPU in about half a year, then perhaps
| > that's the better choice.
|
| I would say I'm open to swapping the CPU I get for a new one in the
| future, but not that soon.
|
| Basically, if I can overclock the Q6600 to 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz FSB,
| using only the stock cooler, without reducing the life of the chip; then
| I will get the Q6600.
|
| Is this possible?
|
| Kind Regards,
|
| Matt

 

[Gypsy Baron]

I would say I'm open to swapping the CPU I get for a new one in the
future, but not that soon.

Basically, if I can overclock the Q6600 to 3.0GHz using a 1333MHz FSB,
using only the stock cooler, without reducing the life of the chip; then
I will get the Q6600.

Is this possible?

Kind Regards,

Matt

The Q6600 G0 stepping is easily overclocked to 3.0 GHZ.
I run mine at 3.2 Ghz on air cooling and my temps when
under extreme load ( Prime95 ) never approach the max within
10C. Under my normal load the temps are 20-25C below the max.

Paul

 

[Patrick Vervoorn]

The Q6600 G0 stepping is easily overclocked to 3.0 GHZ.
I run mine at 3.2 Ghz on air cooling and my temps when
under extreme load ( Prime95 ) never approach the max within
10C. Under my normal load the temps are 20-25C below the max.

Out of curiosity, since you give relative values:

What temperature do you see for the Q6600 as a whole?

And what are each of the core's temperatures?

Regards,

Patrick.