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

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Matt

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
 
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!
Click to expand...

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.
 
Matt said:
Hey guys. I'm looking at upgrading my PC and I've come across an
Click to expand...
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.
 
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!
Click to expand...


All depends on what you're doing, I suspect. I'd take the dual core
because most of what I do isn't cpu intensive.
 
Matt said:
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!
Click to expand...

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.
 
Matt said:
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
Click to expand...

Is the decision easier to make, if you overclock the Q6600 to 3GHz ?
The G0 stepping seems to overclock pretty well.

Paul
 
All depends on what you're doing, I suspect. I'd take the dual core
because most of what I do isn't cpu intensive.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies guys.

Most of what I do is work or play games on my PC, so there are times
when it is idle. The thing is I'm upgrading because I want my PC to
perform well at the times when it isn't idle.

I'm also thinking about the future. Four or five years ago when I
bought my XP2000+ CPU it could cope with anything I threw at it, but
now it even struggles when I'm multi-tasking with lots of web browser
tabs, e-mail client etc. running. So getting a CPU that will perform
well now just now, but in the future is paramount.

Multithreaded applications may be scarce at the moment, but in say 2
years time won't every single application I use be ulitising every
available core my CPU has?

Kind Regards,

Matt
 
Matt said:
Multithreaded applications may be scarce at the moment, but in say 2
years time won't every single application I use be ulitising every
available core my CPU has?
Click to expand...

Are you going to spend the $$ to upgrade all the software to the multithreaded
versions?

Will you still be using the same machine in 2 years? Will there be a Q6800 at 3
or 3.4 GHz available?

Since the price is the same, decide on what will be more useful to you NOW and
in the near future.
 
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.
Click to expand...


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
 
Are you going to spend the $$ to upgrade all the software to the multithreaded
versions?
Click to expand...

Given I can get software on student licences, in all likelihood yes
whe my budget allows.
Will you still be using the same machine in 2 years?
Definitely.

Will there be a Q6800 at 3 or 3.4 GHz available?
Click to expand...

Good point, but that will require further expense.
Since the price is the same, decide on what will be more useful to you NOW and
in the near future.
Click to expand...

Now is clearly the E6850, as I'm not keen on overclocking due to the
noise consequences of having loads of massive fans around my case;
even though the Q6600 has the potential to reach 3GHz itself. It just
depends how quickly multi-threaded applications (and will all multi-
threaded support quad as well as dual core, or will that come later?)
are introduced.

Kind Regards,

Matt
 
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.
Click to expand...

Even a single core clocked at 3GHz would beat the quad at
2.4GHz, as antivirus, firewall and most "etc" things only
use a percent or two of processing time, even less when
running at lower priority in parallel with the forground
app.

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.
Click to expand...

Only now are a few taking good advantage of 2 cores. On
average a single core at 3GHz is faster than a quad at
2.4GHz... we can certainly find examples of games that _do_
take advantage of 2 cores, seldom more, but these are
noteworthy in being exceptions rather than the rule.
Looking forward it depends on how long one were to game with
the same system, keeping in mind that after a certain point
the system is relatively slow compared to (then) modern
systems and might need upgraded again for best benefit.

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.
Click to expand...

It was a better choice... keeping in mind the mitigating
factor if one is an overclocker, that they might be able to
o'c the quad more significantly (I mean higher % since it
starts at lower speed), except that significant overclocking
of quad cores, IF one is making use of them for demanding
processing, creates quite a power and thermal load the
system PSU and cooling have to deal with, as well as the
heatsink noise. I remember a few years ago it seemed
(kids?) were willing to have systems that sounded like
hair-dryers just to get high overclock but today reducing
noise seems the status quo even among overclockers.
 
John Weiss said:
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.
Click to expand...
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!
JLC
 
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.
 
JLC said:
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.
Click to expand...

Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!
 
Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!
Click to expand...

Oh wait, never mind:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-5.html
 
Bob Fry said:
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.
Click to expand...

One area that well often benefit from some form of
distributed processing is, video processing. There
are many who wouldn't think of creating a "render
farm" but would be glad if they could have access
to some of the benefits of such a setup. A Quad-
core approach may just match the scale and needs
of the home video Editor, at this time.

Luck;
Ken
 
Gamespot's review is astonishingly inadequate. All we know is,
many current generation cpus/video cards are enough to run
Crysis at 1024x768 Medium quality, but no combo is enough
to run it at 1600x1200 High quality.

How about 1024x768 High? Very High? Or 1280x1024,
which is the standard/native resolution many, many gamers
run at? We just aren't told by Gamespot's review. STUPID!
Click to expand...

Sadly, no rig yet runs Crysis at 1600x1200 with high IQ and sustained
FPS that we have come to expect.

But we still have reviews which hem and haw and measure low resolutions
and minimal IQ settings, as if to try and trick us into thinking we are
going to get a "next-gen" experience.

FarCry ran well enough at low resolutions with the 6800GT it was bundled
with, even better with the 7800GT that came out the year after, today
you can run two copies of FarCry on a dual core, 8800GT PC simultaneously.

So, we patiently wait on the next batch of hardware (which will likely
be two 8800GTs on one board) to see if Crysis will be playable at
1600x1200. Farcry was a exciting game and I'm sure Crysis (FarCry2) will
be worth the wait.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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

Kind Regards,

Matt
 
M> I'm definitely running several apps at once, which is what
M> makes this decision tricky :(

Only if your apps *use the cpu actively* (say 30% or greater). At the
moment my machine has--let me check--76 processes, but I'm using only
about 5-10% total cpu time (on a dual-core AMD).
 
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.
 
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