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Dual core or Quad core really?

andymac

andymac

andymac

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Joined
17 Oct 2004
Posts
347
I have been searching through these forums and I have noticed a trend towards the new Intel Q6600 quad core processors as the spec up of choice, especially for gaming, however further research has shown that a dual core processor, say an E6600 will work better in just about all settings except for video encoding and multi-threaded applications, in games and real world usage, the dual core processors offer a better in game frame rate, and better thermal efficiency.

So what is the actual story, are the Q6600s special in some way that other net reviews and benchmarks are not getting, or are they just favourites here because they are the newest thing?

Opinions?

Andy
 
The only cases in which dual cores beat quad cores is in single threaded and dual core optimized applications and this is ONLY due to their higher clock speed (when comparing something like the q6600 and e6850).

Basically all new applications and games are multithreaded these days so the quad core will outperform the dual core (4 cores is better than 2! ).....also the G0 stepping quad cores all overclock quite a bit.

Quad core all the way.
 
The Q6600 also has 8MB cache as opposed to the 4MB cache on the E6600.
If your buying a core now I would go with the Q6600 its around £20/30 more? You'll be future proofed for a lot longer.
I upgraded my E6600 to a Q6600 GO last week and currently running it nice and stable @ 3.4 - 1.425V. Bring on Crysis now!!!
 
Loowi_ashley said:
The Q6600 also has 8MB cache as opposed to the 4MB cache on the E6600.
If your buying a core now I would go with the Q6600 its around £20/30 more? You'll be future proofed for a lot longer.
I upgraded my E6600 to a Q6600 GO last week and currently running it nice and stable @ 3.4 - 1.425V. Bring on Crysis now!!!
Click to expand...

Surely the cache is irrelevant though....as it's still 2mb per core.
 
Buying the OEM q6600 plus a turniq cooler and perhaps some artic silver and its costing 30 quid less then the E6850 would to do the same. Makes it a better choise.

Think about it. When you ovreclock a quad or a duel from 2.4ghz to 3.5ghz your goin to see a big boost in performance. Anything over around 3.5ghz and you wont really notice it. So why go for a duel? shure they overclock to 4ghz but you wont notice the difference ovre the 3.5ghz taht can be reached on the q6600. And when the likes of crysis, alan wake (which is being made on a q6600) etc you will see a big performance increase with the extra two cores.
 
8igdave said:
Buying the OEM q6600 plus a turniq cooler and perhaps some artic silver and its costing 30 quid less then the E6850 would to do the same. Makes it a better choise.

Think about it. When you ovreclock a quad or a duel from 2.4ghz to 3.5ghz your goin to see a big boost in performance. Anything over around 3.5ghz and you wont really notice it. So why go for a duel? shure they overclock to 4ghz but you wont notice the difference ovre the 3.5ghz taht can be reached on the q6600. And when the likes of crysis, alan wake (which is being made on a q6600) etc you will see a big performance increase with the extra two cores.
Click to expand...

Duel? didn’t know we were back in medieval times;):p

I would go for the Quad as mentioned its more future proof if there is such a word.
 
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deadkomodo said:
I think intel's C2D has a shared cache pool? :confused:
Click to expand...

Duals have a shared 4mb cache, Intel Quads have a pair of shared 4mb caches, one for each pair of processors. So Cores 0/1 share a single 4m cache, and cores 2/3 share the second 4m cache.

Penryn based cpus are the same, but have 2x 6mb caches.

Nehelem based cpus will be a single cache shared against 4 cores, with each core able to process 2 threads at once (Think of it as Hyperthreading on steroids)

Nehelem will be intels first 'native' quad. But in the real world the gains of going native are quite small except in synthetic applications, especially with vista which intelligently allocates threads that need interprocess communication on cores with a shared cache, while independant threads are pushed to remaining cores when available.
 
If you're going to buy a E6600 or above it just makes sense, price wise, to go for the Q6600. If you are on a tighter budget, e.g. E2140-2180 then they are obviously a much better price/performance chip.
 
Nehelem will be intels first 'native' quad. But in the real world the gains of going native are quite small except in synthetic applications, especially with vista which intelligently allocates threads that need interprocess communication on cores with a shared cache, while independant threads are pushed to remaining cores when available.
Click to expand...
:eek::eek: Really? Vista is that smart? :confused:
 
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