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why buy a dual core when quads are available?

romperstomper said:
Why buy an hd ready tv !
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Good analogy - it's only worth buying an HD TV if you have some HD material to play on it. If you only have non-HD material then you might as well save some money and get an SD television. By the time you have some HD material and need and HD set, they'll be twice as good and half the price.

I'll get a quad core when it'll actually advantage me. For now, my £130 4Ghz dual-core does a better job in virtually app and game I use.
 
As most people have said, if all you do is game you may aswell get one of the new 8*00 series chips and clock the pants off of them past 4GHz.
I do lots of rendering at Uni, so glad I have a Q6600 :)
 
^ dunno why matey, each to their own :D

I got the q6600 because I do a lot of encoding, does that make me stupid too :D
 
I do a whole load of coding and compiling where the number crunching of the quad is all kinds of sexy.
Also an easy OC is to 3.6GHz and it is truly mighty, I also love the ability to throw things at the extra cores that aren't doing anything.

Also for electronics simulation the QUAD is a monster
 
Try doing a rar archive on a 10GB vm file :) Then try 2 at once - voila! All cores heavily utilised :D Then wonder how on earth you are gonna get that core usage again with running Prime95 :p

I simply could not resist the quad in the end - I had a dual core opteron for 2 years, then upgraded and bought an E6550 based system (it went to 3.3 GHz) just before Christmas and felt shortchanged :rolleyes: ... now I got a quad that'll do 4GHz and sold the dual C2D. I am a happy bunny with plenty of straight line speed (power) AND torque so to speak :D

And, code development was never so sweet since being on a quad - except of course at a time when the GUI was non-existant back when I had a makefile with 'f77 -O3 -libx file.f file2.f -o test.exe' to compile something that I had written in vi ....
 
I just ordered a quad for my second pc as its the last cpu that will allegedly run on the Asus P5WDH Mainboard unless anyone knows different. My other pc based on a blitz board with an e6750 runs nicely oc'd to 3.4ghz so swings in roundabouts, that saying my mates q6600 encodes avi to dvd quicker than my e6750.
 
yeah, i notice my (work bought) quads are often all active doing different things. File indexing, a virus scan, I dont really know. How reliable is the task manager processor usage thingy? It certainly shows a lot of activity!

I think the other point in defence of quads is that i do recall tomshardware comparing the best quads with the best duals and the quads out performed even single processor games in the last generation chips. Of course the 6850 or whatever it was did cost like £800! So for people with more money than sense. This time the price gap isnt so big...

at end of t'day it depends what you want (or even, what you need ;)).
 
Because a dual core wolf has far better chance on hitting 4ghz, and even 4.5ghz is slightly possible.

3.6ghz on a quad needs the best air cooling possible.

I'd rather have a dual because it clocks further and my games use one core or core 1 + core 2 @ 50% at best.


So I'll get the wolfie :D
 
Pneumonic said:
.. so unless you are using apps that take advantage of multi cores then there is no really performance gain to be had by using a quad..
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What if you use older applications on XP then?

Does windows assign each app its own core or does the apps need to be specifically written for dual/quad core CPUs?
 
pointy shadow said:
What if you use older applications on XP then?

Does windows assign each app its own core or does the apps need to be specifically written for dual/quad core CPUs?
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windows assigns tasks wherever it sees there is free processing space. so if you are using a million programs at once it will spread the processes across all of the available cores in your system... this is certainly what happens on my old Core Duo laptop. But i'm not sure how effective this part of XP is with 4 cores
 
i'm happy to keep my q6600 for now to be honest, 4 cores @ 3.8ghz is a monster now matter how you look at it.

sure the wolfies clock a bit higher but i love the multitasking a quad gives me.
 
marscay said:
i'm happy to keep my q6600 for now to be honest, 4 cores @ 3.8ghz is a monster now matter how you look at it.

sure the wolfies clock a bit higher but i love the multitasking a quad gives me.
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I agree somewhat.

Whats the point of getting a wolfdale C2D if it only does 4ghz, when you can get a quad that will do 3.6 or 3.8? the difference would be a couple of fps at best in a game.

IMO, it seems like its only worth getting a E8400 or E8500 if it can clock to 4.2+ at least stable.
 
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