Anyone who went Quad wished they had stayed with Duo?

[Tom|Nbk]

Yes, no improvement over two cores in gaming.

Nice one braniac incase you didn't notice that is multi threaded for quad core. Unlike most other games out today which are not.

 

[Teal]

If you pick one of the extremely few games capable of using multiple cores then of course you get a boost

Give it another 12 months or so and there will probably be 5-10 games capable of making good use of multi-cores, but right now they are very thin on the ground.

By then there will be better/cheaper quads around.

 

[helmutcheese]

Real Quads (Native)

 

[stickroad]

Real Quads (Native)

Got a while yet.

 

[helmutcheese]

Oct-Nov for AMD Quads for servers, prob 2008 for desktop Quads or get lower clocked new AMD Dual in Nov

 

[clv101]

I'd rather have my four 3.33ghz cores than two 4ghz cores

That's just the point isn't it. For lots of people, most I'd say, two 4GHz cores is better than four 3.33GHz cores. Certainly is for me - I don't do that much stuff that would benefit and the stuff I do isn't time critical so I'm not bothered if something takes 10 minutes or 20 minutes to encode, certainly not bothered enough to spend money, have a hotter system and burn more electricity.

The difference between one and two cores is significant - the difference better two and more than two is increasingly less significant.

 

[stickroad]

Ignore.

 

[helmutcheese]

I dont make movies these days, I couldnt care if 4 cores is tad faster encoding, its about gaming now for me (only real time my PC will work hard these days).

I would take the E6850 and go for 4GiG on air as some have gotten, but not 24/7 OC as no need for, just to game and feed the 8800Ultra.

 

[Magic Man]

Same for me. My new rig is for gaming and of that I'm hoping that most will be FSX.

FSX can use multiple cores but users have seen no benefit of four cores over two whereas the stock extra 600MHz speed of an E6850 over a Q6600 will be used.

I'd rather have that with the possibility of a nice overclock at a cooler temperature than a couple of underused cores heating my room.

When the faster quads come down in price then I'll make my choice again dependent on my needs at the time...

 

[Leepox]

dual cores should be good for at least another year. Native quads *** - ill be waiting for that

 

[riddlermarc]

I am looking at the AMD quads to upgrade my home test server, purely to (hopefully) increase the performance of the VMs I have on there - I assume Xen will be happy running against four cores. This machine isn't for gaming, encoding etc but purely as a VM host so it will benefit from a quad I think

 

[melbourne720]

Quads have got to be the best for the price. If you only want two cores, what are you paying 150 for a chip? Get a e2160 and clock it. They go to 3-3.5GHz, which is (a) fast enough for most people, (b) excellent value for money, and (c) means that most games are GPU limited.

Multi-threading is the future, are any of the new games coming out not multi threaded? And last time I checked, 4 is twice as big as 2

 

[Tomsk]

If you don't have the apps and the usage pattern that need it then it is a waste to buy one.

If you do then nothing else will match it.

I'm sure there will be a good few people around who bought one because the price came down and not because they needed it.

That's me.

This is my first upgrade and new PC for nearly three years. I expect it will be another three years before I upgrade again so I got the best I could afford.

 

[robj20]

I've been considering a quad as an upgrade from an Athlon XP simply because they're perfect for Folding@Home. Serious crunchers.

If you are serious about Folding@home, then a PS3 is what you need that completes them in about 8 hours.

 

[Vanilla]

If you are serious about Folding@home, then a PS3 is what you need that completes them in about 8 hours.

The thing is i'm sure a Q6600 would destory a PS3 AND there is the fact that you don't generally leave a PS3 on all day and night like a PC (well, mine is on constantly!).

 

[robj20]

The thing is i'm sure a Q6600 would destory a PS3 AND there is the fact that you don't generally leave a PS3 on all day and night like a PC (well, mine is on constantly!).

I tend to leave my ps3 on over night about 3 nights a week downloading demos and games, and leave folding running, it tends to complete 2 work units over night.

Anyway im very happy with my quad core even though it doesnt get used 100%.

 

[ergonomics]

you know EVERY game, whether multithreaded or not will see an improvement, as you can use the other cores to run every other background task

(may not be massive, but its true though)

 

[Chris Beard]

you know EVERY game, whether multithreaded or not will see an improvement, as you can use the other cores to run every other background task

(may not be massive, but its true though)

Ah but there is an overhead to running more than one core!

 

[lay-z-boy]

F@h
Encoding
rar'ing loads of files at the same time
vmware
rendering
a/v work

since i moved to quad these apps fly like never before, running vista x64 with 60 odd processes and it still runs with all that stuff running as it did when i first booted into vista.

games run about the same but I don't expect a speed increase.

Tempted to get another for fah/farm

 

[ergonomics]

Ah but there is an overhead to running more than one core!

explain please