Dual core vs Quad Core...

[ArmyofHarmony]

Hi,

Had a debate earlier with a mate who suggested a dual core over a quad core to another friend looking to buy a PC.

Now I was arguing that you might as well buy a quad core, they aren't much more expensive and surely the very nature of it means it's faster?

Could someone please highlight the merits of both and confirm that suggesting the quad core was the right idea!

BTW. His argument is that most software won't utilise all 4 cores, and the clockspeeds of dual cores are higher as standard?

 

[95thrifles]

He's right, this has been discussed to death too
Check this thread for arguments

 

[ArmyofHarmony]

Thanks, I probably should have added this system would not be used for gaming, but mostly web surfing, development, photoshop etc. Does it still remain true that there's little value in quad?

 

[realscot]

Decent CPU Cache and plenty of faster memory would be more important to photoshop etc. And if its not gaming then perhaps being efficient would be more important.

 

[gareth170]

more app's and games will be coming that will utilise all 4 cores.

if your gonna be using encodeing software then quads are good for that.

 

[littlepuppy]

If he is going to be multithreading use quad, if not use dual....

 

[harris1986]

iirc clock for clock the quads are faster? so there for I would in a 8400vsQ6600 scenario I would opt for the Q6600 put a easy mild overclock up to 3ghz and you would have a faster cpu.

 

[marcus_667]

Well photoshop absolutely loves quads mine loads up in a second or 2 where as my old E6750 used to take an age

 

[gurusan]

in 99.99% of games an e8400 will smoke a q6600. The game has to be programmed to not only take advantage of 4 cores, but do so efficiently...and we should see more games like this in the coming year.

 

[pastymuncher]

Not another thread?

Your mate is right, at the moment. If you will be keeping the rig for a long time then it may make sense to buy a quad. At the moment a highly clocked dual is best for gaming and if programmers start writing games to use all the cores you could always drop a quad in if neccessary. If multithreaded games ever become mainstream anyway.

 

[Zillio]

Got a copy of Call of Duty World at War for Chrismass and it uses all four of my Q6600 cores. Each one running at about 60% load @ stock clocks, how fast you got to run a dual core CPU to beat that?

 

[gurusan]

dual cores cream CoD games no prob.

 

[Final8y]

There are more Multi Core games out than people realise.
Better read the back of your DVD games collection.

 

[95thrifles]

Yes but when they refer to multi core, 2 is a multiple

 

[reflux]

Actually quad cores are better for gaming than people realise. A lot of mainstream games use more than two cores; for example, all the Unreal 3 Engine games.

This has been thoroughly discussed to death though.

 

[Nanoman]

Just look at comparison charts, E8400 beats Q6600 in pretty much everything apart from encoding. Till games etc. are efficently coded for quad, dual generally works out better.

 

[Merlinbadman]

There are more Multi Core games out than people realise.
Better read the back of your DVD games collection.

Too true, GRID racing driver (released last spring) uses all four of my CPU cores.

For lastabliity I would go with a quad if buying now.

 

[Gone2mars]

Trust me guys ... i've been programming professionally for a rather long time.

Writing a completely multithreaded application to run stable is twice/four times the work and twice/four times the debugging. The more theads running the more work you have to do, so i don't believe multithreaded games will ever become main stream because its simply not worth the development cost involved... not saying multithreaded games won't appear, but i just don't believe a game will ever FULLY take advantage of 4 CPUs.

Stick with 2 cores for gaming and 4 cores for an application machine.

 

[linktoinsanity]

4 cores application machines can game too. It depends on how long you want the machine to last. Four core machines are quicker in windows from my own personal experience and the extra cache benefits games aswell. However cost wise, I'd say you should go for a Dual at the moment, unless you do video encoding or have a lot of applications open at once and then to support that you need very fast hard drives in RAID0, otherwise the hard disk bottlenecks the CPU, speaking from experience, my aging Seagate 7200.10s bottleneck my computer with multiple applications such as virus scans, CSS, itunes and numerous other programs open, kind of making the Quad pointless really. I keep thinking a faster dual and new hard drives would have been more handy...