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Swapping from quad to dual?
- Thread starter Modjo
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Thanks for posting that, lay-z-boy! I've been having a hard time choosing between the quad and dual as well, especially with it looking like a good few are swapping quads for the higher clocked duals. Going on that article and the fact that as time goes on we'll see more and more games making better use of these cores I think I'm definitely leaning towards a quad now and not going to wait for the e8600.
Cheers for that.
Cheers for that.
Soldato
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i went from G0 to a 8400 and i am more than happy. It runs faster clocks better and consumes less. Also i believe th FSB just cant handle the Bandwith the quads need....nehalem is around the corner so i see no point in investing in a quad .
In the amd camp the situation is far worse , the X2's are miles better than phenoms
In the amd camp the situation is far worse , the X2's are miles better than phenoms
Soldato
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Soldato
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higher clock speeds means better performance in my books. The quads are better when there is software that will utilize the 4 cores , and there are so few afaik. So its a waste of energy and money since most of the time it will not gain you anything
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Crysis never got its official Quad support AFAIR, it did not have at launch and I don't think the joke of 3 patches fixed much.
It is funny as I agree with 1 post in here, the one about the same peeps who slagged others for buying a Dual about 1 year ago now are selling their hot Q6600's and buying E8500's.
If you want to OC like mad then wait on the E8600, its new Stepping clocks better so you could also stop at 4-4.5GHZ same as on a good E8500 but hopefully on lower voltage than a good E8500.
I have never bought a quad as by the time I really need one there will be far superior cooler running ones and I will be spending a good few £100's on it.
It is funny as I agree with 1 post in here, the one about the same peeps who slagged others for buying a Dual about 1 year ago now are selling their hot Q6600's and buying E8500's.
If you want to OC like mad then wait on the E8600, its new Stepping clocks better so you could also stop at 4-4.5GHZ same as on a good E8500 but hopefully on lower voltage than a good E8500.
I have never bought a quad as by the time I really need one there will be far superior cooler running ones and I will be spending a good few £100's on it.
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Agreed...I had a quad core since the day the G0's were released...and its done me no good at all in anything
FIXED
E8400 does 4.0 as easy as Q6600 3.2ghz. Good ones get to 4.2-4.5
Also there's been already a lot of reviews of E8600s hitting 5ghz on air, nothing uncommon on higher volts with decent cooling (I am personally getting one myself when they come to UK).
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And about quads, even if the game can utilize all 4 cores, most of the tiles wont be really able to use most of it anyways, so if a game just uses 60-70% power of fast dual core, having 4cores on 40% load wont be any better
.I am giving it at least minimum of extra 12months to 1,5yr+ before quads will be truely utilized. And by that time current quads like Q6600 will be already to slow
, hence I wont be buying quad just yet if I dont use software that can use these at 100% ( encoding, graphics, sound etc ).
Multithreaded coding isnt easy, all to often you end up in a deadlock, where 1 thread is simply waiting for a result from another.
Take a graphics and physics engine for instance, the physics have to be calculated before the graphics engine can render up the display.
Somethings you would think to be rediculously easy to thread, take an antique game like transport tycoon, with hundreds of truck, trains and aircraft. You would think you could just split out hundred of AI threads for pathfinding, but as soon as two vehicles want to take a similar path at a junction you get a race condition, and the two threads have to "work together" to get a single result. In the end its a lot simpler to have everything under the control of a single thread.
That said there are some extremely smart programmers, and I have no doubt that better utilization of multi cores in games will come about sooner or later.
Its probably part of the reason why Crysis struggles to make much use quads, there is too much interdependance between the threads, so one thread is idle, waiting for results from another.
Multithreading is at its greatest on tasks which are easily make parallel. Processing, and rendering video for example, which can be split into blocks of frames, and each core deals with small blocks of frames, or dynamic html web sites, where each visitor to the server can have an entire thread to themselves. The more CPU's or cores the more threads can be processed in any given period of time, almost perfect scaling.
Take a graphics and physics engine for instance, the physics have to be calculated before the graphics engine can render up the display.
Somethings you would think to be rediculously easy to thread, take an antique game like transport tycoon, with hundreds of truck, trains and aircraft. You would think you could just split out hundred of AI threads for pathfinding, but as soon as two vehicles want to take a similar path at a junction you get a race condition, and the two threads have to "work together" to get a single result. In the end its a lot simpler to have everything under the control of a single thread.
That said there are some extremely smart programmers, and I have no doubt that better utilization of multi cores in games will come about sooner or later.
Its probably part of the reason why Crysis struggles to make much use quads, there is too much interdependance between the threads, so one thread is idle, waiting for results from another.
Multithreading is at its greatest on tasks which are easily make parallel. Processing, and rendering video for example, which can be split into blocks of frames, and each core deals with small blocks of frames, or dynamic html web sites, where each visitor to the server can have an entire thread to themselves. The more CPU's or cores the more threads can be processed in any given period of time, almost perfect scaling.
Seems I've opened a can of worms here. Found this helpfull review (hmm...) (especially the end statement in bold) dated March '08! And I quote.....
"Intel has a winner on its hands with the Core 2 Duo E8500...... (for those ppl swapping from quad to dual)
...Unfortunately the E8500 also signals the end of easy, crazy-high overclocking for Intel chips due to increased standard FSB speeds. Because even if you end up with a really great board that runs fine with a 500MHz FSB, the lower end E8200 with an 8x multiplier would max out at 4GHz - which as we can clearly see is far below the potential of the 45nm Wolfdale. When Intel switches to 1600MHz FSB for its mainstream parts, the maximum overclock achievable on a good board with a lower multiplier less expensive chip will be limited to about 12.5% which is not exactly earth shattering.
We should enjoy the 35%-50% overclocks that we can currently achieve with reasonably priced parts while we can - the E8500 may well be one of the last easily significantly overclockable mid range part from Intel for a while.
At the stock 3.16MHz it already provides excellent performance for office use, encoding and gaming; and given that it is also an excellent overclocker, it absolutely shines and screams when pushed to the limit.
Frankly, for a gamer, an E8500 is a better choice than a quad core QX9770 - and it will remain a better choice for a gamer until such time as the games are no longer GPU bound and are extremely multi-threaded - which will not happen for quite a while."
"Intel has a winner on its hands with the Core 2 Duo E8500...... (for those ppl swapping from quad to dual)
...Unfortunately the E8500 also signals the end of easy, crazy-high overclocking for Intel chips due to increased standard FSB speeds. Because even if you end up with a really great board that runs fine with a 500MHz FSB, the lower end E8200 with an 8x multiplier would max out at 4GHz - which as we can clearly see is far below the potential of the 45nm Wolfdale. When Intel switches to 1600MHz FSB for its mainstream parts, the maximum overclock achievable on a good board with a lower multiplier less expensive chip will be limited to about 12.5% which is not exactly earth shattering.
We should enjoy the 35%-50% overclocks that we can currently achieve with reasonably priced parts while we can - the E8500 may well be one of the last easily significantly overclockable mid range part from Intel for a while.
At the stock 3.16MHz it already provides excellent performance for office use, encoding and gaming; and given that it is also an excellent overclocker, it absolutely shines and screams when pushed to the limit.
Frankly, for a gamer, an E8500 is a better choice than a quad core QX9770 - and it will remain a better choice for a gamer until such time as the games are no longer GPU bound and are extremely multi-threaded - which will not happen for quite a while."
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£125 of dual core vs £900 of extreme edition?
Wow.
While we're at it, let's compare a single 7.2k 500gb drive vs 4 v-raptors in raid 0.
At least compare the 8500 with the cheaper q6600 but even then it's apples and oranges.
Both are good at their own things however the ability heavily multi task and work quick through visual work moved me to the quad.
On the subject of cheap cpu's I got my e2180 for £5, now that's a bargain.
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What this statment was trying to say (I think) was the best dual core would be a better bet for the gamer than even the most extreme (and most expensive) quad. Tho I'm no expert as I've yet to experience to joys of quad multi-threading
