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Is it time for Quad Core?

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,171
Hi guys,

Currently running an E4300 @ 3Ghz which until the appearance of GTAIV I was entirely happy with. I'd always been under the impression that for gaming a decent Dual Core CPU was as good as a Quad if not better.

Now, I'm aware that the GTAIV episode is a bit of a debacle really and I'm aware that its a badly coded heap of crap but it has got me wondering if its the shape of things to come.

Should I upgrade my E4300 to a Quad Core? If so, given a budget of £80-£140 either used or second hand, what CPU should I buy and what clocks should I expect using an IP35 Pro, Freezer7 Pro and OCZ Platinum Rev2 DDR?

Cheers!
 
yeah i would its a no brainer.. with that setup i'd imagine 3.2ghz should be easy to achieve theres a few q6600's in MM at the moment
 
Ah seeing the light ......finally ;)

On a serious note, yep go for it. With your existing hardware you should easily manage 3.2Ghz+ on a Q6600 (which go for around £95) if you get a reasonable Q6600. Check out MM there are several Q6600 on there atm :)
 
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It's still going to make little difference, if any, in games due to the simple fact that there are hardly any games that make use of multi cores. I was "persuaded" this time last year to get a Q6600 by certain members of this forum and while it clocked to 3.8Ghz most of the time it had two or even three cores doing nothing but suck up vast amounts of power and chuck out enough heat to make a Prescott P4 look like a cool running chip.

Maybe in a couple of year's games dev's will have got off their backsides and program games to use the extra cores it will be worth it (and i don't mean two or three games, that's hardly mainstream). Until then unless you do rendering, encoding and stuff like that, no, it's not really worth it. By then we will all most probably be on new sockets to.
 
pastymuncher said:
I was "persuaded" this time last year to get a Q6600 by certain members of this forum.
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hehe wasn't me

EDIT: for gaming get a E8400 or better, forget quads really for now. As far as GTA4, many are having problems with it, not sure a quad cpu upgrade will be the solution, rather needs some major patching.
 
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most of the time it had two or even three cores doing nothing but suck up vast amounts of power and chuck out enough heat to make a Prescott P4 look like a cool running chip.
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No because if it wasn't doing anything those cores will all be at idle state and each would drawing the same amount of power as if you were on a idle windows desktop.

p.s. Q6600 may be old tech. but it's also the best bargain of the second hand quads now. The only similar 45nm chips have way less cache and no VT extensions which may or may not be important to you. Also the 1066fsb is a good thing, it means you can overclock it easily without requiring top quality ram and high fsb's.
 
LOL, its old hat, get a 45nm Quad if you really must.

Cooler running has SSE4.1 etc etc.

Anyhow most now grasp they were not really "Real Quads (Native) nor are the 45nm even OCUK Store now acknowledges this in the AMD Quad and Intel new CPU section. ;)
 
Well if buying new then obviously get a Q9550, if not Q6600s are awesome. On top of that they are bulletproof :)
 
Indeed, love my Q6600, multi tasking is great and i often encode some crap.
Also huge benefit of having battlefield 2 and team fortress 2 open at the same time.

And only more and more software/games are going to use 4 cores.
But for now stick with a decent overclocked dual for gaming.
 
I think the new GTA runs bad on whatever system you have at the moment, just wait till the new patches come out to sort it out.
 
Hmm...I'm not sure I would rush out and pick a new CPU over and above your existing one for the sake of one game. Maybe just keep an eye out for a possible bargain but I would wait till well after Chrimbo at least to check, as you state, whether this is the shape of things to come.
 
So why isn't the Q6600 a proper Quad Core?

The thing is I need a new CPU for my other machine - just bought an IP35 Pro for it.

Options are either to buy a used E4xxxx from MM or buy a Quad and put my E4300 into it. Seems more sensible to do the latter..
 
The Q6600 is a pair of dual core dies in one package, the AMD quads are a single quad core die. Saying the Q6600 isn't a proper quad core is a bit misleading though, it has 4 fully functional cores just like the AMD chips.
 
[TW]Fox;13026702 said:
So why isn't the Q6600 a proper Quad Core?
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DigitalReaper said:
The Q6600 is a pair of dual core dies in one package, the AMD quads are a single quad core die. Saying the Q6600 isn't a proper quad core is a bit misleading though, it has 4 fully functional cores just like the AMD chips.
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jellybeard999 said:
Its 2x dual dies rather than single quad die.
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This is Intel dual-core / 64bit all over again ... where AMD bring out a proper versions first and it then takes Intel a good few years to catch up (remember Intel's 1st dual core chips were 2 single core dies in one pack, rather than AMD who had proper dual cores).
 
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