In article <f58f97ac-fc2f-48c3-8cf0->,
Matt <> wrote:
>Hey guys. I'm looking at upgrading my PC and I've come across an
>interesting problem:
>
>- Pay £165 for a Intel Dual Core E6850 (clocked @ 3.0GHz)
>
>- Pay £160 for a Quad Core Q6600 (clocked @ 2.4GHz)
>
>Now to my untrained eye, the quad-core seems like an easy choice. Am I
>correct, or is the performance benefit from the 2 additional cores
>completely lost by the low bandwidth connection between the 2 dies, as
>mentioned in a Wikipedia article below:
>
>"A quad-core CPU (as a two-die set in particular), however, can rarely
>double the processing ability of each of its constituent halves (e.g.
>the Kentsfield rarely doubles the ability of the Conroe), due to a
>loss
>of performance resulting from connecting them (i.e. sharing the narrow
>memory bandwidth, and operating system overhead of handling twice as
>many cores and threads)."
>
>Will all applications for Windows eventually become multi-threaded and
>fully utilise a quad core setup? Because if so then surely the 2.4GHz
>quad core would outperform the 3.0GHz dual core in the future?
>
>Basically this comes down to dual core vs. quad core, and I'm hoping
>there's a clear consensus about which to buy!
I had the same decision to make, and I went with the Q6600. At the very
least Crysis detects and uses the 4 cores. SetiBOINC also runs very nicely
using 4 cores.
Regards, Patrick.
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