I've been on the outs with hardware technology for a long time now.

I am running a pretty crap system (athlon xp 2400+, x800xt AGP).

Finally thinking about upgrading, also have the money for it, figured it would be a good time.

My biggest question is with processors. I see since the last time I was up to date on hardware quad core processors are readily available for under $200 even.

What's the deal with these? It seems kind of excessive. Will the quad cores boost anything I do, or is what I am doing have to be quad-core compliant?

Largely this will be used for heavy photo editing & gaming.

Thanks

Well someone will correct me because im the first to post..

But Hello!

And...


Alot of people who run both Core2Duo and Core2Quads will have their own opinion.

Your right about the compliancy though. I'm not too sure if i'm caught up on the statics of this. But so far only around "2%" of the world applications are associated with Quads at the moment. They are cheap yes but not useful 100% of the time. So personally. I wont be utilizing them yet.

What I use is the Core2Duo. A E8400 3.0 Ghz processor. These retail at about 190.00 now and have great overclockability as you can see in my signature.

If you buy a upto date high end card. You CPU will always be bottlenecked. So the E8400 or if you go Quad the Q6600 are excellent options in which you can overclock to alleviate the bottleneck.

I hope this late night garble helps a little....

Depends what games you are going to be playing and if they are in the "The Way it's Meant to be Played" Green camp or not...

The jury is still out...

If your refering to Nvidia.
All my Nvidia cards have been better upto the 9800 GTX OC+

Until I picked up the Raedon 4870X2 from Clarke.
That card rocks!

Well. I am not and have never been someone who has the money to spend on something that can run new games maxed out.

It would certainly be nice to play them at full, but not necessary.

That is actually an artist's rendition of Clarke's face when he got his first post 4870x2 times 2 power bill for NSPower. Some say that there is going to be a gold plated washroom with diamond encrusted toilets in the new HQ with his name on a plaque on it.

Way to go Clarke!

Quad's, Gaming, Oh YEAH! depending on the game...

Don't tell me your a common poster on there...
And just a reader...

Just a reader, and note the white text

You're so sneaky!!!

i agree and i dont agree. i notice a HUGE difference in gaming from a e6600 to a q6600 stock. load times are about 10-20% faster with the q.

and if u are building a pc for gaming. go for a high L2 cache. you'll appreciate it
as top secret posted, the e8400 is about the best value high cache processor u can get. without going quad. in my opinion.

but as i said if u do a lot of gaming like i do. you'll like a quad

Looking at the e8400 though, if I can afford to spend 200+ on it, a dual core. Might I just as well go up to a quad? Even the phenom 9750 is cheaper.

I guess what I am saying is that in my mind quad immediately seems better than dual core, what are the downsides of going with the cheapest quad core as opposed to one of the most expensive dual cores?

Well from my experience a Q6600 will be the same performing as a E8400.

Although when it comes to single or Dual processing power. A e8400 would be the best performing bang for your buck.

But games like "Supreme commander" in which I believe uses Quad cores (Correct me if i'm wrong). Will perform better with the Q6600.

Reading a bit today and scavenging around the WWW. I found that people are saying a Q6600 is pretty much the equivilant of the E8400.. Until you get into software that will utilize quad cores.

There isn't really any downsides between these 2 processors. I'm pro E8400 but i'm biased.. Being that I have mine overclocked to 4.21Ghz and 21,000 3D Marks. It's a really forgiving processor for me.

Rone, Dr. and Clarke have the Q6600 and i'm sure they are based as well. But they have done amazing overclocks on those as well. So they can help answer your questions.

I'm slowly being left alone in the dual core world...

AMD uses a different archeticture than Intel does. And at the moment are losing the war in processors. They are good, cheaper, and I support them due to keeping the competition alive. But I wont use them for gaming because (No offense to anyone) But they are much slower, and have less cache on them as well.

I recently built a large HTPC server with a AMD Triple Core server. Hence saying I do support AMD. I have to help keep them alive.

It's all going to depend on what your ratio of gaming vrs "heavy photo editing" is.

If the main intent is gaming, then a dual core will more than likely get you better performance. If on the other hand, gaming is secondary then despite software not being able to utilize 4 cores, the OS should get a boost from the extra two cores when you have multiple instances of programs open.

In a nutshell... at similar pricing, a dual core will have a higher clockspeed than it's quad equivilent which will translate into better performance for the majority of programs which don't take advantage of the extra two cores.

One other point.... if you're doing a full upgrade, avoid going with the current AMD lineup. The difference in price isn't worth the drop in performance, and trying to decifer which proc will actually run on which AM2 board is a nightmare.

Greater power consumption, less OC - generally speaking, there's always golden CPU's that OC like mad.

Phenom... Better to go with a Q6600, they're under $200 now if you look.