Is Core 2 Duo always faster than non-Core 2 Duo CPUs?

In a notebook or a PC, if a device has Core 2 Duo as the CPU, is it
always going to be faster than the fastest Intel generation chips? I
don't know if that makes sense, but I was looking at a laptop that had
Core 2 Duo and it was about $900. It had the Core 2 Duo, but it said
it was at 1.6 GHz. I know some of the Pentium 4 computers (that was
the last generation right? or was it just core duo?) had higher Ghz
ratings. I am just trying to get a handle on how to decide on which
is best for performance. Thank you.

 

Core 2 Duo is fastest, by far, even at slower clock speeds.

Go to tomshardware.com They're a good CPU comparison tool.

Any way you look at it, the Core 2 Duo is the top of the heap right now.

Tom

 

To piggyback on your question, does 4M cache perform much better than
the Core 2 Duo's with 2M cache?

 

Unfortunately it does get confusing. Go to tomshardware.com to
educate yourself and see various processor comparisons. He can better
explain than I can <g>.

 

Yes. 4Mb is the sweet spot. That's why my two new desktops have E6600
CPUs. That's the lowest 4Mb CPU.

Look at the comparisons. It's a big jump

 

Ok, lets ask which is better..
4 Mb cache, 1 gig ram vs. 2Mb cache, 2 gigs ram ?

I know cache and ram aren't the same thing and my guess is the first
is still a better choice at least in theory. Is it true even in
practice ?

 

I just want to make sure I can see the difference with the human eye.
I looked at Tom's Hardware and it appeared that was the case between
teh AMD X2 and even the lower versus higher end Duo 2 Cores.
Overclocking the lower Duo 2 cores, however, apparently made up for
the speed. I'm not much of an overclocker, however.

 

The 4Mb chip is better with a gig of RAM simply because you'll be more
likely to add RAM than swap CPU's (cost/trouble).

Sorry to butt in.

Stew

 

Core 2 Duo is faster than the comparable previous chips. But all of
these chip families come in a wide variety of speed ranges. The slowest
Core 2 Duo may not be as fast as the very fastest "netburst" chips. But
you would be comparing a $200 Core 2 Duo against what had been a $1,000
netburst chip. Ignore the clock speed, but you can find online
performance comparisons.

 

Yes, the 4M cache Core 2 Duos are faster than the 2M Core 2 Duo's (even
at the same clock speeds), but how much depends on what you are doing.

 

I have to say I love my E6600 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo 4mb cache.

Now that's a marketing name.

These are rough estimates, as I haven't written them down, but I convert a
lot of video from Mpeg to AVI. Comparing an E6600 Dimension 9200 to a
P4-2.66 Dimension 4550, I went from about 1 1/2 hours to convert an hour
long standard def program to around 10 minutes.

Yes, 10 minutes.

 

No other components in the mix that would affect the 1.5 hours?
that's impressive.

 

I don't believe I stated that anywhere, did I? The reality, though, is that
video conversion is almost entirely CPU constrained, which is why I used it
as the example. Both machines have similar memory and virtually identical
hard drives (Seagate 750Gb IDE drives), so the primary differences would be
bus speed (not a limiting factor in conversion) and disk speed (again,
pretty close, given identical drives).

Since they were rough estimates anyway, they were intended as examples.

Curious why you would feel the need to make such a statement?

 

I'm curious why you would be offended by it. I just wanted to know.
It was not intended to question your authenticity. I was just so
impressed that I felt the need to respond for affirmation. I simply
meant it more conversational than anything.

 

I clearly read something into it that was not intended. I apologize.