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Quad vs Duo - games & windows?

bfar

bfar

bfar

Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2004
Posts
2,550
If anyone has any benchies, put em in here. I'd love to see the whole picture in black and white. some of you must have swapped an E6600 for a Q6600? Is there ANY difference?

I see a lot of people going for the q6600 energy efficient, which sounds like a really good deal. However, I've seen no hard figures showing why it's better to have a quad over a duo, espessially for a gamer.

I have a bunch of vouchers for a local store. I could get an E6850 and overclock the knickers off it. They also stock retail q6600's would that be a better option for a gamer? Or should I keep my E6600 (fine at 3.2) for a while longer?
 
[...] gamer [...] gamer [...] gamer [...] gamer
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Just keep the E6600, or at least wait until the new Quads. Don't bother with E6850.

I've gone E6600 - Q6600 - E6600 (that what I thought of it :p)
 
Very recently switched form a E6400 to a Q6600, isn't a E6600 but not far off. Difference was about 7 FPS in Crysis for just the CPU change. I seriously wouldn't bother with a E6850 for the price, if any duo I would get a E6750 which is much cheaper and 200 Mhz difference which is easily added in the BIOS with little hassle. Windows is snappier on the quad I've noticed, but I've not done much testing and really only played some Crysis.

E6400
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e6400-gts512-allhigh-postmed-stock.jpg


Q6600
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q6600-gts512-allhigh-postmed-stock.jpg
 
Quad isn't worth it right now if all you're going to be doing is gaming. Since you mention being a gamer in your post I'd assume that's all you're bothered about - don't bother with a Quad right now.

I currently have an E6600 and I've just taken delivery of a Q6600 but then I'm not a massive gamer :)
 
Tetras said:
Just keep the E6600, or at least wait until the new Quads. Don't bother with E6850.
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Agreed.
Tetras said:
I've gone E6600 - Q6600 - E6600 (that what I thought of it :p)
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Similar storey here, I've went from a E6600 > E2160 > Q6600 and back to my E2160.

I've no intention of upgrading to quad again until I feel my current chip isn't cutting it in games.
 
Kind of expected this response. Wish there was something faster out by now.

I've had the same CPU for a year. I feel dirty.
 
Supereme Commander works better for me on Q6600 vs my old E6600 at the same clock. Also I can clock the G0 Q6600 higher than a E6600.
 
i only managed to get my e6700 to 3.2 stable where as i have my q6600 at 3.6 stable (if a little hot)

3dmark06 e6700 @ 3.2 = 13500
3dmark06 q6600 @ 3.6 = 17500

so yws there has been a difference for me

(that was with 8800gtx SLI)
 
Yes, wait for the Penryn quads then get a cheap one and overclock it massively, they will probably hit 4ghz with improved IPC and more cache, yummy :)
 
There is something like £17 difference between a dual core and a quad, to be honest anybody buying a dual core needs their lumps felt!
 
I've just changed to a quad Q6600 from a dual core E2140.

I can only clock the quad to 2.7Ghz due to my motherboard being relatively poor at clocking them, but my E2140 was at 3Ghz.

I'd say in Windows, I can't notice any difference, although undoubtedly it would be quicker than the dual core in those apps that can take advantage of more than 2 cores.

In games, even giving away 300mhz to the dual core, the quad is quicker. Approx 10 fps faster average in crysis, with almost double the minimum frame rate, and also much quicker in Company of Heroes. Both these are games that use multi cores though, so probably not a fair comparison. In Crysis in particular, although the frame rate increase is small, it means the difference between playable and smooth, to my eyes anyway!

I haven't noticed any of my other games such as COD4, Test Drive Unlimited and MOH:Airborne running any slower either.

Overall, it seems much more of a capable partner to go with my SLI 8800GT's, although how much of that is due to the extra cache on the Q6600 over the E2140 I don't know.

If I'd had a 4mb cache Core2, then maybe I wouldn't have changed it, but as the poster above points out, with such a small difference in price between a Core2 and quad, it seemed daft not to get the quad.
 
I've just run the Custom PC magazine performance benchmarks too, as I had stored the results from my E2140. The rest of the system is the same for both CPU's.

For those not familiar with these benchmarks, it does an image editing test using Gimp, then a couple of video encoding tasks, then a multi tasking test using 7 zip whilst playing a video.

(% in brackets = Q6600 performance relative to E2140)

E2140 @ 3Ghz.

Image Editing: 379 seconds with 50% average CPU usage - 990 points
Video Encoding: 689 seconds with 83% average CPU usage - 1190 points
Multi Tasking: 304 seconds with 76% average CPU usage - 615 points

Overall Score: 932 points


Q6600 @ 2.66Ghz

Image Editing: 415 seconds with 25% average CPU usage - 904 points (-9%)
Video Encoding: 525 seconds with 61% average CPU usage - 1561 points (+31%)
Multi Tasking: 246 seconds with 40% average CPU usage - 760 points (+24%)

Overall Score: 1075 points (+15%)


It's a shame I couldn't do a clock for clock comparison, but my Mobo just won't run a quad stably at over 300mhz FSB, but even giving away +300mhz, it's still a good performer, as you'd expect I suppose.

Mind you, you need to take into account that an E2140 is about £45, and the Q6600 about £155, so from a value for money sense, the E2140 is a star performer.

The Q6600 seems to be better at gaming though, going on my experiences in the above post.

I think I'm going to volt mod the mobo, which should get me 3Ghz on the quad, so I'll post again when I've done that, and assuming it works of course!! :)
 
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If you're comparing E6600 vs. Q6600 vs. E6850 then they a;ll top out about the same when you clock them and one has two more cores - Q6600 is the best value Intel CPU over £100 at the moment, but the 21x0 series are the bargains at this moment in time. But that will also change when you can get a dual-core Core2Duo based Celeron for £25 in February.

Intel's real problem is how to keep users from overclocking the darn things:D
 
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