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Dual Core - is clock speed as critical ?

Soldato
Joined
24 Jan 2006
Posts
2,610
Having played around with my opteron DC at 2.6Ghz it's currently stepped back to 2.25Ghz so I can unplug the loudest case fans and recover some of my hearing.

There is virtually no perceptable difference in performance between the speeds during any normal usage or gameplay. Benchmarks obviously show the difference but that's the purpose of them.

My thoughts are that with a DC chip and widows XP it is rare to max out just one core (unless you set affinity) as XP does a reasonable job of balancing the load.

So assuming I have 70 % accross the cores under moderate to heavy usage @ 2.25Ghz, then at 2.6Ghz I'd probably have 60% usage accross the cores (rough estimate) with the applications and memory / drives etc being the limiting factor the performance difference for most users is not perceptable.

Anyone else share this view?

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That is the case but only if you're running one app. When you max out both cores, as I do, having a higher clockspeed makes a difference. It is able to churn through the work faster.

As is usually the case, performance scales with clockspeed. It's just in this case you're not pushing 100% of your CPU resources and you're having a tough time seeing the difference.
 
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