i7 or phenom II?

diogenese · 28 Apr 2009 at 07:12

I've been crunching on a Q6600 for nearly two years now and thought I should get me an update but I haven't been following the scene as closelly as I used to

I don't seem to be able to find any comparisons related to crunching power per pound as the i7's seem a bit pricey with the relevant motherboard.

I was a bit shocked to find that a Q6600 is the same price now as when I bought it in july 07 :eek:

Then...

Order date and time: 23 Jul, 07, 12:53 am. Your order consisted of the following items:
Item Qty Price Thermalright Ultra-120 (Socket 754/939/940/LGA775) Heatsink 1 £29.99 Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "LGA775 Kentsfield" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail 1 £149.99 Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) 1 £5.99 Sub Total: £185.97 City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri) Shipping: £8.00 Total Vat: £33.94 Total inc Vat: £227.91

Now...

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail

£172.49 inc VAT
£149.99 ex VAT

Biffa · 28 Apr 2009 at 09:17

Not tried AMD for a while now but I'd hazard to guess that the i7 poos all over it for any crunching work. The Phenom really only holds its own in gaming now, which is a real shame.

Happy · 28 Apr 2009 at 09:29

i7 defiantly.

shadowscotland · 28 Apr 2009 at 10:16

Neither - for the same money get a multi gpu system with a cheapo duel core (or reused the Q6600) at least 3 or 4 time the ppd. 8 to 10 times with a 4 pcie slot board.

Happy · 28 Apr 2009 at 10:32

Well that's another a much better way of looking at it

ChrissyT88 · 28 Apr 2009 at 11:52

But gpu crunching is so dull... crunching in four Linux VMs sounds much more interesting!

Berserker · 28 Apr 2009 at 12:52

Four linux VMs is too many for a quad. Bear in mind that four of the cores in the i7 are 'fake' (hyperthreaders) so aren't going to be of huge benefit.

PS - the Q6600s came down a lot in price, but the exchange rate has wiped out all of that.

Happy · 28 Apr 2009 at 13:09

Running four VMs (one real core and one HT core) for an i7 provides more PPD than running two VMS for the real cores. There were some benchmarks posted somewhere

It was only about 1.5-2K PPD more though iirc.

ChrissyT88 · 28 Apr 2009 at 13:39

Berserker said:
Four linux VMs is too many for a quad. Bear in mind that four of the cores in the i7 are 'fake' (hyperthreaders) so aren't going to be of huge benefit.

I was under the impression that hyperthreading was actually quite good in the new i7s? Obviously not up to a real core, but still pretty good. I was wondering if there was a way to identify the 'real' cores from the hyperthreaded cores within windows? Aside from doing a bench with something like F@H and setting the affinities, i havent heard/seen anything. From a F@H point of view, it would be great to run two VMs on the 'real' cores and then either a winSMP or multiple uniprocessor clients on the hyperthreaded cores.

WFO from xtremesystems was reporting approx 7000 ppd from four VMs with an i7 920 at stock settings. Road-Runner (also from XS) was getting 10,300 ppd from two native linux SMP clients on Ubuntu with a 920 clocked at 3.8 Ghz.

If you want maximum ppd, then GPUs are certainly the way forward, but if you need a new processor thats faster than a Q6600, i think the i7 setup is a btter choice than a Phenom II. I must admit im contemplating the upgrade for something new to play with!

diogenese · 28 Apr 2009 at 18:52

I don't "need" to do anything, I just want to

I've tried gpu's and I can't cope with the heat or the noise

So it's looking more like an i7 and I suppose I need a 64 bit OS to go with that or I'll be wasting all that ram bandwidth!