Quad-Cores

dennis721

Baseband Member
Messages
49
So how do Quad-Cores/Dual Cores work? Will a Quad-Core rated at 2.4 Ghz outperform a P4 rated at 3.0 Ghz? Is a quad Core 4 times 2.4? Thanks for the help!
 
A Pentium 4 is a single core processor and uses the old netburst architecture so yes the Quad core would outperform it. An Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 is really two Core 2 Duos (dual cores) in one chip. Theoretically, it should be twice as fast, but that's not entirely the case. The reason being software. Most software is either made for single core CPUs or dual cores, which means quad cores are not fully taken advantage of and not used to their full capacity. The best example of this is in games where a equally or higher clocked dual core will often outperform the quad.
And to answer your question about whether a quad core running at 2.4Ghz equals 4x2.4. The answer is no. Those ebay listings you see with quad core 9.6GHz CPUs are false. Inside a Q6600 which is the best selling quad core processor, there are four cores running at 2.4GHz. You cannot add up these speeds, it simply doesn't work like that.
If you are doing a lot of video/audio editing and encoding then go for a quad core as these are very CPU (central processing unit/processor) intensive tasks and many of them are multi threaded which means they can use quad core CPUs to their full effectiveness. If you are gaming, then a dual core CPU is better. If the PC is onyl going to be used for surfing the web, word processing etc then a single core CPU is sufficient. I hope this helps you. If you have any other questions then don't hesitate to ask and I'll do my best to answer them.
 
Wow, that's actually quite expensive and are you sure you're going to be doing 3-way SLI? I would recommend a combo like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186134- X38 motherboard. No SLI support but better boards in general compared to the Nvidia chipsets.
Or this one if you don't want to spend quite as much: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130098
The X38 mobo supports DDR2 and DDR3 memory (not at the same time BTW). The P35 supports DDR2 memory only. But the performance difference between DDR2 and DDR3 ATM is virtually nil. So not having support for DDR3 is no real loss. The X38 also has PCI-E 2.0 support but no graphics card will be able to take advantage of this at least not within the next year or so. The last thing the X38 has on it's side is support for the new 1600MHz FSB CPUs but these will only be the mega expensive Core 2 Extremes so everything points to the P35 as the best motherboard for you.
As for the CPU, the Q6600 you were looking at is very good if you're going to be doing some video editing. There are also a few other options:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115037- This is one of Intel's new 45nm CPUs. They are more energy efficient and can do more per clock cycle than the older 65nm Conroes. Here's an article about them: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-wolfdale.html
The other choice is one of the new 45nm quad cores, but they won't be available for another month or so. The cheapest one (Q9300) will cost in the region of $266. It will have a clock speed of 2.66MHz and a 6MB L2 cache. There's another article about it here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q9300.html
The other option I know of is the Q9450. I'm not sure of the clock speed but I now that it has 12MB of L2 cache. I think the price is going to be around $300.
 
I'm definitely not going to be doing three way SLI, i hardly game at all, but i figured i would get something nice that would last for a few years while being able to at least try to keep up with technology advances. You think there's going to be a chance of cards (other than video) using the pcie x16?

I am in awe of your knowledge about these things, really I am
 
The X38 boards have two or even three PCI-E slots and as far as I know, the only other card that sometimes use a PCI-E slot are sound cards but most of them just use a PCI slot. The X38 supports Crossfire BTW which is ATI's technology and allows you to do the same thing as with SLI.
EDIT: Many P35 mobos also have two PCI-E slots.
 
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