Intel E6850 vs Q6600 ?

[CraigHappy]

Hi Guys

I'm looking at updating my oldish system (Athlon XP+ 3200) and I'm torn between the Intel E6850 cpu and the Q6600.

They seem to be at the same price, but can't make my mind up to go with a faster Duo (3.0Ghz) or a slower Quad (2.67Ghz) processor?
I've checked out Tom's hardware pages and the E6850 has the slight edge in speed, but only just. Didn't know if there are a lot more benefits for going with the Quad?

I would be very interested in your opinions?

Many thanks

Craig.

 

[cdogg]

From what I've seen, the E6850 is more for the money here. In most gaming situations, the E6850 will outperform the Q6600 as a result of the faster clock speed. The same is also true in just about every multimedia editing application such as Photoshop or Premiere. The difference can be as much as 15-20% in some cases. Here are the only examples I could find where the Q6600 would win handily:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/29/intel_penryn_4ghz_with_air_cooling/page26.html

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[Nelviticus]

It depends what you want to do. If you're going to be doing tasks or running apps that take good advantage of multiple cores then the quad would be a better bet even though the individual cores are slower. For tasks that aren't multi-core aware, or aren't fully optimised for multi-core, the duo will be faster.

That said, they will both be blazingly fast. The quad will draw more power, which may or may not be important to you.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[cdogg]

Nelvitcus,
That is the theory behind it. However, benchmarks have shown that even Photoshop and Premiere (both multi-core aware and multi-threaded) are actually faster on the Core 2 Duo than they are on the Quad-core. The faster clock speed on two cores outweighs the advantages of two additional cores all running at a slower speed.

It's gets to be pretty complicated as to why, but I suspect the time to kill one thread becomes more important that having the ability to run two more threads simultaneously - a product of diminishing returns and software that's not quite tweaked to its full potential. This isn't always the case however, as shown in the benchmarks I linked to above.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[paparazi]

CraigHappy
Read this review: it has lots of the answers you are looking for.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/08/dual_vs_quad/index.html

Martin

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[CraigHappy]

Many thanks guys.

I'll have a read through Tom's Hardware review and see if that helps to make my choice.

But if anyone else would like to add to the input, I'd be very happy to read your opinion on this.

Many thanks

Craig.

 

[CraigHappy]

Hi guys

And a big thanks for all your feedback.
I have read a lot of reviews, particularly the one from Tom's Hardware site and the general census seems to be that the E6850 is faster for normal single threaded applications and games, but the Q6600 is faster for programs written for multi threaded programs. Also with a few over clocking tweaks the Q6600 can indeed run faster than the E6850.

That said, as I'm not a gamer, I don't really like to over clock my processors and the bulk of the applications I want to use are single threaded, e.g.. Dreamweaver, Fireworks and general office applications, I think I have decided to go with the E6850 which is currently the exact same price as the Q6600 for a mobo bundle from Novatech.

Thanks again for all you input and I hope I don't regret my decision in the months to come!

Cheers, Craig.