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Intel P4 or Dual core

jor000

jor000

jor000

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Joined
2 May 2006
Posts
4
I cant find a thread on this subject to do with intel, but basically i want to know if its worth getting a Dual core over a single core.

Money is not really an issue, but dont want to waste it, eg wouldnt pay an extra £150 for .2GHz because its the latest. I would therefore be looking at probably the second best of both varietys. I use windows media player to watch films, internet browser, video editing and a few other bits at the same time and dont know if having a dual core would be much different to a much faster single core with a few gigs of memory. I was looking at the 930 dual core 3.4GHz, but after reading other threads realised i might be better off with something like a P4 660 3.6Ghz single, with more RAM

Any help or oppinions on this matter would be much appreciated, Thanks, Jordan
 
Dual core are much more future proof, but get an AMD unless you are buying the 805 and overclocking a lot.

They are generally cooler, faster, use less power and overclock pretty well as well as decent motherboards being cheaper.
 
Ok, i hadnt even looked at AMD. I have an amd athlon 2800+ (clock at 2.08Ghz) at the moment and its struggling to do a few tasks. i was only going with intel as i heard they were true to their speed they were advertised as where as AMDs run a lot slower. The top AMD dual core 4800 says it only runs at 2.4Ghz where as intel says 3.4Ghz, and is cheaper. But if AMD is the one to be with ill choose that instead.
 
jor000 said:
Ok, i hadnt even looked at AMD. I have an amd athlon 2800+ (clock at 2.08Ghz) at the moment and its struggling to do a few tasks. i was only going with intel as i heard they were true to their speed they were advertised as where as AMDs run a lot slower. The top AMD dual core 4800 says it only runs at 2.4Ghz where as intel says 3.4Ghz, and is cheaper. But if AMD is the one to be with ill choose that instead.
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4800 will be two 2.4Ghz cores, and run around 4Ghz in terms of Intel speeds, won't they?
 
Oh dear. One rule must be made clear, clock speed means NOTHING, NOTHING I TELL YOUUUUUUUUUUUU. Ok, it does, but it's not the be all and end all. The number given to AMD Cpu's is the equivalent speed pentium chip - well it used to be until they went all funny in numbers too. So, a amd 4000+ means it's equivalent to a pentium 4 4.0ghz, even though it's only clocked at 2.6ghz.
 
does the fact that AMDs L2 Cache is half Intels have anything to do with its speeds and ability of running aplications?

So which should i go for then, AMD or intel, and then single or dual core?
 
The AMD processor does twice as much per clock cycle than the Intel, making it a far better chip. Do not be fooled by the the big gigahertz rating of the Intel. If you have the money buy the AMD X2 4400 as it has 1meg of L2 cache per core and if you fancy overclocking it should be ableto clock to near 2.6. Or you can go for the Opteron 165 /170 which are great clockers and can hit 2.8 on air.
 
Zefan said:
Oh dear. One rule must be made clear, clock speed means NOTHING, NOTHING I TELL YOUUUUUUUUUUUU. Ok, it does, but it's not the be all and end all. The number given to AMD Cpu's is the equivalent speed pentium chip - well it used to be until they went all funny in numbers too. So, a amd 4000+ means it's equivalent to a pentium 4 4.0ghz, even though it's only clocked at 2.6ghz.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I know that, hence why I said they'd be running at around 4Ghz.
 
Each architecture is rather different and the extra cache on the Intel chip will benefit it more than for an AMD chip. The 2MB L2 cache on the Intel PD has a rather high latency too hurting performance

The Intel chips only have 16KB of L1 cache versus the 128KB L1 cache of the AMD chips

If you look at all of the benchmarks you'll see that the AMD X2s consistently outperform the PDs, partly due to the far superior architecture.

Depending on when you're looking to buy, if you can hold off until June/July then I'd look at the Conroe chips as all early indications and benchmarks show these to outperform the X2s and PDs by a fair margin
 
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