Advice not needed.

[MoBo]

Hi

Why is everyone so intent on getting quad core cpu(s) when there are no applications to take advantage of them? I'm not knocking anyone who want one, but there seem (to me) to be lots of threats were you guys want to know if you'll notice the difference between an E6400 and a Q6600. I for one didn't notice much difference when i went from an XP2500+M to my 3200 amd 64, it may have booted up a little quicker. I brought into the whole 64 bit technology, ignorant of the fact that windows and every other aplication is 32 bit and in many cases still 32 bit, which brings me back to quad cores. Be realistic guys if your system runs 100 attosecond faster your not going to notice it.

I feel that this site everyone is to concerned about getting the fastest rig, not getting best value for money, I was thinking of getting an E6420 until i read this excellent threat here by Melbourne720. Now I can spend £50 on a cpu and still be getting the same performance if I spent 3 times the amount.

Why (i hear you ask) am i going to go C2D, because i'm down sizing to a sugo s01-e, plus i can give my old rig to my g/f.

Mobo

 

[paradigm]

Well for one, damn near any application coded for multi-threading is by its very nature coded for quad-core. There are many apps already out that can utilise 4-cores, and there are games either out or due that will utilise them also.

64-bit is no longer merely a feature of the chip, I've been on a 64-bit OS for the best part of a year now, and granted whilst most apps are still coded for 32-bit, there are some out there now that can use the extended instruction set.

Not that the 32-bit/64-bit thing makes a difference with current desktop processors (like it would with the itanium/itanium2), as the 64-bit instructions are merely an EXTENSION of the current addressing, so no emulation is needed to run x86-32 code on an x86-64 chip.

64-bit OS's allow the allocation of over 3.5GB of RAM, even to 32-bit applications, which will only be of benefit to high-texture games (crysis, alan wake, bioshock, etc).

Its called progress. Sure I'm only on a dual-core right now, but I was awaiting the price cuts. I will go quad on payday.

 

[firewallblocked]

I also found that windows didn't appear that much faster when I upgraded from my athlon xp 2000 to a socket 939 athlon64 3700. It's when I install and run several different anti-spyware, anti-trojan as I spend a lot of my time cleaning virus off of friends at work pc's that I really notice the cpu difference. I don't play many games but a faster graphics card will help make up for a slower processor depending on the game.

For me I would upgrade to a core2 duo maybe a quad core so I could run 2 or 4 anti-spyware programs at the SAME time. Doing this on my athlon64 slows it down loads, for me being able to scan an external drive faster by running several anti-trojan & anti-virus programs at once would make me upgrade as my pc spends most of its time removing viruses from other pc's.

My mum now has a athon64 3700 I build and she only uses it for word,excel, email & photos. She even has crucial Ballistix memory! I have standard crucial memory. Before that she was on a pentium 3 until last year. It did the job until I installed antispyware stuff.

 

[Nullvoid]

I stopped reading when you said there are no applications to take advantage of them

Just because you are not aware of any does not mean that no such applications exist...

Sure, someone who just does a bit of gaming/internet browsing/movie watching will likely see no benefit whatsoever going from dual to quad-core, but then if we get into things such as encoding of videos/rendering 3d-graphics/folding@home ( ) just to name three, the performance boost becomes quite apparent.

 

[stickroad]

When your spending in the region of £150 - £200 on a processor why not get a Quad Core?

 

[C64]

Try cs source on an athlon try supreme commander then try a core 2 duo.
I have found most of my games far smoother on a core 2 not to mention
multitasking as for not worth getting a 6420 6600 etc etc it is worth
it if you want a high overclock with lower temps and stability.
Personally i will not be upgrading until penryn part of what you say is true
i don't see the need for too much over 3.2ghz at the moment but in six months
you may need a 3ghz core 2 duo minimum to run certain games in high detail
smoothly.

 

[DavidB]

a lot of the time people arent willing to overclock, and dont plan to upgrade for 2years or so, and ask if they should get 2cores at 3ghz, or 4 cores at 2.4ghz.

With modern programming being made towards multiple cores a 4core processor is obviously going to be far more future proof, and indeed, for a lot of people 2.4ghz is more than enougth.

Its not as clear cut as "quad is better", but in a variety of situations it can be the case.

 

[stickroad]

Comparing a E6850 to a Quad 2.4GHZ:

In most of the game benchmarks it shows that the E6850 beats the Quad, but in reality the diffrence is pretty small. Certainly going for a Quad when your just playing games, you certainly wouldn't be disappointed.

Anything else, encoding, multitasking then the Quad wins hands down.

So Quad is surely the better choice.

Yay - Nay?

It really depends on how much your willing to spend on the CPU.