quad versus dual core

marine1

marine1

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Guy seeing as you are all so clever please could someone offer some good advice?
I want to get a new processor tomorrow but dont know which one.
Either the core 2 8500 or the quad core. The quad is cheaper so which one is actually better?

Thanks
 
you've opened up a can of worms - this is possibly the most heated discussion in the industry.

As it stands there are not a lot of applications that use 4 cores (quadcore). Some games are starting to use all 4 cores - so if you're buying for gaming Future (Not Not NOW - this is where the debate gets heated), then quad is the way to go.

But, having said that - the latest Dual cores are really good, they currently run games faster as generally speaking dual core chips are clocked higher than the quad ones.

The other side of it, is if you do 3D or work with Photo/Video editing, where, with the latest adobe patches etc, the Quads are beating the Duals, but note, only when patched to use quad - otherwise the Duals win.

The bottom line is what you're gonna use it for... if it's multipurpose - I'd go quad - hell I'd go quad anyway out of personal preference. But the Dual cores overclock like monsters (not that everyone overclocks mind you), where the quads all can't get much above about 3.8ghz(as far as I've seen).

Again - overclocking - don't know if this is something you're considering - if it is - then the dual core is the way to go - if not then the quad might be better in some instances.

As per usual - to many things to consider - so tell us what you want to do with it...
 
Depends, the quad core should be better than the dual core for multi-threaded (in this case more than 2 threads) applications, while the dual core should be faster with older, single-threaded applications.

It all depends on what you use your PC for ;) If you're a gamer I'd probably recommend the dual core for now and a quad core once the long-awaited truly multi-threaded games appear...
 
I'd go for quad given the choice.

For Gaming:

UnrealT 3 benefits.

Where the UT engine goes, the rest follows.

From a technical point of view, its not very difficult to program for 4 cores. The problem is getting the overall architecture right for games. E.g. Rendering thread is done but the AI thread is not...so do we display the results without full AI or wait. Timing issues for the programmer... This is mainly what's holding the programmers back. There is no really suitable parallel model for games yet.
 
I went quad on a pc of a mate and I must say it is great. I am going to go quad on mine now as well after seeing how easily it handles windows and other applications. Gaming is not bad - we played crysis on high smoothly on a 22"

Depends really on your needs. I game/programme/edit video/etc so quad is best for me - and it is kinda future-proof for a couple years.

Based on what you are doing - I think you fall in th esame category as me - so I can suggest you go quad and use the spare bucks to get a spare HDD or something.
 
quadcore are amazing

your whole system feels like its faster on a quaddie dont go dual core if you can afford the q9300 get it

although i will say its not that great for overclocking very limited
 
I had the 2.4ghz E6600 and now have the 2.4ghz Q6600

No difference for me in gaming.

IN movie encoding/divx/winrar/etc; there's a big difference, but Crysis has shown no FPS increase. If you look at windows's task manager - CPU graph, you'll notice that Crysis barely touches more than 2 cores. A 3ghz dual core will beat a 2.4ghz quad core in gaming. Unless of course said game actually uses all cores.

Most of the load is on the GPU anyway.

So get the Quad core if you do lots of intensive video editing/encoding/multitasking, but rather get a bigger dual core for gaming. You can always upgrade later.
 
I'm still deciding between Q6600 and Q9300...
I was going to get the Q6600 since you could overclock it to outperform the 9300 but the Q9300 has SSE4 which could be a greater benefit for video and MP3 encoding, I'm still undecided though.
 
n1hilist said:
If you look at windows's task manager - CPU graph, you'll notice that Crysis barely touches more than 2 cores.
Click to expand...
Just curious: How are you checking the taskmanager while playing crysis? Dual screens?
 
Generally speaking, without considering technology differences, Quad Core beats Core 2 Duo. If you take a 3GHz C2D you have a theoretical 6Ghz, but a 3GHz Quad will be 12. Apart from having double the amount of static RAM (cache RAM on CPU), you can fill four cores instead of just two. So you can run (ie in Windows) explorer.exe on one core, a media player in another core, use Adobe Acrobat in core3 and whatever in core4. Then you have 3GHz for each of them. Easy, 'ey?
 
You can use dual screens or, just fire up task manager, goto the CPU graph, alt-tab back to Crysis and alt tab back later.

Or run Crysis in windowed mode.

HavocXphere said:
Just curious: How are you checking the taskmanager while playing crysis? Dual screens?
Click to expand...
 
Btw, I"m not trying to sway anyone away from getting a Quad core, but don't think that 4 cores is going to somehow make your box mad fast. It's very much dependent on the software's ability to make all of those horses work hard.
 
n1hilist said:
Btw, I"m not trying to sway anyone away from getting a Quad core, but don't think that 4 cores is going to somehow make your box mad fast. It's very much dependent on the software's ability to make all of those horses work hard.
Click to expand...

Look at my last post and you will see my point. If you don't allocate cores to processes and you use software that doesn't support something like a quad core, then obviously it won't be that fast.
 
Holy crap this sucks, why the hell dont these guys use the technology properly? Surely having a quad core should make your machine a rocket but it seems that software developers are actually far behind.
 
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