Quad Core Vs. Duo Core Gaming Laptop

Is it worth going for a Quad Core now, or do you think Duo Core is still fine???

 

which exact speed?

 

For the Duo core 2.93ghz, and the Quad 2.00ghz?

 

I think a Quad Qore in a laptop would become VERY hot! I would choose the Duo, and its much cheaper too

 

What kind of laptop do you have??

 

Are many games even using Quad-core now? Most of my previous games are just using one core.

 

Not many take advantage of more than one core, and those that do, use two, and even fewer use four. Although it seems this is slowly changing as dual and quad core CPU's are becoming commonplace.

 

Dual core is absolutely fine but as you have the choice choose the quad core its even more future proof.

 

Are there any games that will take advantage of 2 but not four?
I was under the impression that it was either single threaded or multi threaded, and if single it just uses Core 0 and if multi, it uses whatever is available.
That's how it's been for games I've seen anyway.

While current gen games will take better advantage of a higher clocked dual core than a lower clocked quad, I think quads are the way to go for future-proofing. On the other hand, you get the dual now, wait for quads to come down, and put a high end quad in later on... also not a bad choice.

 

i'm quaded but i at 3.2ghz. we need to know what system so we can make a better judgement on this situation..

 

in a multi-threaded environment.... the slowest of quad-core CPUs will easily outperform the highest end of dual-core CPUs

 

Makes sense. Though, I think until Quad core gets a mainstream price, multi-thread gaming won't be taking off anytime soon.

 

Absolutely. Running a dual at 3.5ghz in my lappy Wprime "only" scored about 23/24 secs but ppl running Q9000 2ghz get 17secs. Huge difference.

 

I was looking at Asus, and HP. It was more general question regarding about future-proofing with a Quad.

 

the w90 vs a hp? i would choose the asus. sorry but we need specs.

 

The question is: Do you want to play GTAIV?

 

I believe the discussion here is going on between Core 2 Duo and Quad Core right?

 

actually the question is leading to the fact that games like GTAIV recommends a quad-core CPU to get best performance.

games in development now are utilizing multi-core CPUs for rendering and effects.

 

It all depends on the games you want to play and the ammount of money you have to spend.

Most games don't use quads so it comes down to processor speed.

Future proof? Maybe, maybe not. If you're talking about games then being future proof depends on the ammount of games coming out (that you want to play) that make use of a quad.

Although I had the money for the fastest mobile quad, I chose the X9100 @3.06(stock). I couldn't be happier. It overclocks easily to more than 3.55Ghz without any issues or overheating, (stays below 78C).

Some folks need a quad in a multi-threaded environment, but I don't.
I e-mail, Skype, adjust a few family photos, play music, watch movies,burn some DVD's, and do some gaming.

I went for the fastest clocks rather than four cores. It all depends on what games you want to play and what you use your computer for.

 

well put.

 

If I want to address the topic "Gaming Laptop" then I would suggest getting a best GPU rather than CPU. If you got Core2Quad with 2 or 3 or whatever speed and a Intel GPU then it is not good as anything but if you got just Core2Duo 2.2-2.4 ghz and a Nvidia SLI 88m/98m/280m then nothing can stop your performance.
Remember games are GPU limited not CPU limited.

 

Getting the the fastest clocks won't mean much when the bottleneck in the majority of games are the GPU.

I always recommend getting a really good GPU along with a Quad like the Q9000 over a faster clocked Core 2 Duo.

I bet many have spent more money purchasing higher clocked Core 2 Duo CPU's and are getting no more performance in their gaming than some one who has a 2.0 Ghz.

 

I would have thought the same, but a few RTS's do seem to crave CPU power almost over GPU power. DOW II being one of them, the difference even from Core2 Quad to i7 is astounding, cant imagine from Duo to Quad.

 

http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/review-msi-gt725q-9047vhp-intel-q9000-909/5 look this same lappy with duo and quad

 

Core 2 duo, unless ur playing crysis

 

Yeah unless you're playing heavy CPU games, a Quad Core wouldn't be used to its fullest IMO.

Also, if you're on a budget, your money would be best spent on a better GPU than a better CPU since chances are that the GPU will bottleneck performance before the CPU does.

 

Are you running your QX9300 at 3.2GHz?

 

Yup, the more agents in the game (units, etc) that need AI, collision detection, etc performed on them, the more the game is going to be CPU bound. The more polys that are being pushed and the more lighting and particle effects there are, the more you will be GPU bound. There is no hard and fast rule. As long as you aren't at any rediculous extreme (such as 3Ghz Quad with an integrated GPU or 9800M with a 1.4Ghz Celeron), it really is game by game as to what you will be bounded by.

 

But don't you only get the benefit if there are enough threads for all the cores? So if you only have two threads, a 3.0GHz dual core should outperform a 2.0GHz quad core because they're both processing only two threads. I am no programmer, and forgive my layman terms, but I thought there had to be a dedicated thread programmed, and if all there is are two threads, that's all you'll get?

 

If a program is multi-threaded, it definitely won't only have two threads. This might be a problem on 256 core CPUs though, but even then I think it will be okay.
Every little tiny thing is a process/thread.

 

Hmmm. IIRC, and I know this is an old program/game, but Falcon 4 only took advantage of two threads. Granted, it was originally intended for dual CPU's but when dual cores came out, we all enjoyed the benefit. Quad cores had absolutely no improvement otherwise.

In other words though, you're saying that if something is capable of threads, it will split it up indefinitely, at least until you've lost any benefit?

 

yes i am running at 3.2ghz on my qx9300.

ok this is thing. ati vs nvidia.

if you get a nvidia high end then you ca get a lower cpu or if you get a ati card then get a high cpu.

why? because nvidia has physx that make the gpu do the stuff that the cpu is soppuse to do. and it loads it alot faster then the cpu.

how do you know this? any one with a nvidia gpu and physx please run vantage with phsyx disabled and enabled. you will notice when enabled depending on you gpu, the cpu score will triple.

why? because what it did it took everything from the cpu and make the gpu do the work.

cool! but what about disabled? if it is disabled you will see the score drop very bad and if you don't know what your doing (just enable and disable stuff) you may think something is wrong with your computer.

ok, nvidia sounds nice at this point. but what about ati? well ati is in the process of making there version but nothing has come up yet. but because this the cpu must be high end to do it's workload in games and benchmarks.

ok, so what if the gpu load is full and you have physx to work on the gpu, would it slow things down then help? i don't know i don't have a nvidia card to test this. and i don't know how to properly test this threoy out. but i think it would finish the work load of the cpu before anything.

ati sounds bad, why did you choose it over nvidia? this is going to be a long arguement that will not stop for the love of anything so i really don't want to get into it.


so what should i choose? choose what suits your budget. we need to know your price range so all of us can shoot 20 different laptops down your throat until you don't want one no more. lol. if you have money get nvidia and wait for the sager 18in. if not then ati. but we need to know your budget so we can go on from there.

 

Cool, didnt know that don

 

The way I see it is you lose nothing from getting even a lower clocked Q9000, all you get are benefits and more future capabilities. You either get good performance from the fact that the GPU's are the limiting factor in most games or you get the benefit of multi threaded or quad optimised environments. This is all assuming you pair the CPU with a very good GPU.

 

what's snobmobile?

what time is it over there? i wasn't excepting you until in the morning. i'm 8:36pm.

 

ok this is what i can do for you. i will run farcry2 and vantage and 3dmark06 at 2.0ghz quad, 2.0 dual, and 3.2dual and 3.2 quad. on them how does that sound?

 

@don: Don't get so worked up over physx as there aren't many games that make use of it, including most of the popular titles. Even Crysis, "Nvidia's game", use their own physics engine which is CPU dependent no matter which card you're running.

More on why ATI uses Havoc instead of physx.


@the original subject: I've personally decided not to buy a quad-core until the Westemere gets them shrunk to 32-nm and makes the issue of whether or not an app uses multiple cores a non-issue.

Starting with the 45-nm Clarksfield the CPU will overclock the multipliers if less cores are being used. Clocks will increase 1 multiplier step if 4 cores are under load, 4 steps if 2 cores are under load and 7 steps if only one core is under load.

 

i'm not getting worked up. but most new games coming out are starting to use physx in it. that's why i used it that as an example.

 

Just get a nice gpu and forget cpu..

 

I think we all know ya need a good GPU or two in a laptop to game really well.

I have seen with the current crop of mobile ATI cards like the 3870's and the 4870's, that they are more CPU dependent than the current Nvidia cards.

You have a lot more wiggle room when choosing a CPU to work with Nvidia GPU's than you do with current mobile ATI GPU's.

If you have to go "either or" with regards to the CPU and GPU, yes, spend the money on the better GPU's.

I'm very happy with my X9100 and as you can see in my sig, I've got a pair of 3870's so gaming is silky smooth. I have not "wanted" for a quad core and have not been left feeling like I was missing anything during game play.

My suggestion is to do the best you can in the graphics department, then spend as much as you are willing and can afford on the processor.

All the other crap can be upgraded later like optical drive, ram, and even hard drives.

 

As to how many threads there are in a multithreaded app, it all depends upon how the specific piece of software is programmed. It is quite possible that there would only be 2 threads in an app, especially a game, because games are hard to break up in to discreet computable elements. For instance, say you are developing an RTS, and you code it such that it spews out a new thread for every single unit created. Great. However, each of those threads can only run for the period of a single game loop, otherwise they would become out of sync, so they are all bound to basically the slowest element in the game loop, regardless of how many threads you have. Plus with all those threads, you just created a ton of thread management overhead, and have to contend with memory safety issues (such as not having 2 threads working on the same location in memory simutaneously).

What I would bet, actually, is that a lot of games only do have 2 or 3 threads. I've never designed it, so this is only semi-informed guessing, but I would think a logical devide would be to split out collision detection/physics, AI, or I/O from the main game loop in to its own thread. Like I said before, truely effective multithreaded programming means packaging the work to be done in to little self-contain parcels that can run independantly of eachother. This works really well for transactional stuff like bank software or online shopping malls, where each bank transaction or shopping cart order can be done pretty much completely independantly of all others. It becomes a lot more tricky with games though, because everything is interrelated and real time. You start running in to locking issues real quick in scenarios like that.

 

Sorry but Physx does nothing what-so-ever, it added some nice effects I didnt have before when I had an Nvidia card in maybe one game, but it compares to ATI having DX 10.1, its just not utilized near enough to cause a difference.

 

A 2GHz Quad is pointless. By the time Quads are truly utilized, that frequency will be a joke.

 

That's really not true. Core clocks are going up still, yes, but manufacturers are starting to run in to heat and performance blocks as far as upping speed, so they are instead doing things like upping cache, messing with architecture, and most significantly, designing chips that are more and more parallel (ie with more and more cores). Already, we've been seeing procs with cores around 2.5GHz for at least a year or 2, but the arch and parallelism has been getting more and more advanced.

A 2GHz quad will likely still be quite viable in a number of years, I would bet. Also, the idea that quads can't be fully utilized now is ludicrous. Depending upon your usage patterns, you can make quite effective use of 4, 8, 16, 32, or even more cores currently. It's all about how you use it.

 

*cough* overclocking anyone?

From W90 Benchmarks

I like my quad very much thank you its the main reason I upgraded my laptop, now I can do hardcore video rendering on the go like I was on my desktop at home.

 

I've read there's supposed to be only 3 Clarksfield quads offered, the fastest being 2Ghz, and the other two being 1.6Ghz and 1.73Ghz.

The reason for them being clocked that low I'm assuming is because of the self overclocking.

 

It's because clocks mean less and less these days. Everything is in architecture and parallelism.

 

Think about the clock speeds of the shaders on your video card. Mine run at 1375mhz, but with 112 cores. If you've run CUDA physics testing and compared it to the CPU, the difference is night and day. CUDA Mass Water Simulations on the GPU run at 44fps on my 9800M GTX, vs 1fps on the CPU (I don't think the fps count could go lower than 1). The future is in Massive Parallel Operations, and CUDA is the perfect example. The nVidia Tesla is a special GPU designed to run a custom Unix kernal, where the entire system runs off massive cores at a lower frequency. Intel had done the right thing in dropping all dual cores and focusing on quads and the soon upcoming oct-core chips (All hyperthreaded). With the lack of future production of dual core chips, we'll be entering more and more into the high core world.

I like to think of it like this. Compare a 2 wheel drive truck to a 4 wheel drive truck plowing through a thick, deep mud puddle. You may be spinning the tires faster and kicking mud out faster in the 2 wheel drive vehicle, but the 4 wheel drive vehicle is able to travel through it with much less effort.

 

Well, Intel's business model has always been to feed of the high end (and yes, even low end consumer systems are high end procs in the grander scheme of things) and leave the high volume, low margin stuff to other manufacturers. Plenty of single and dual core chips will still be out there. You know, in microwaves, TVs, electric razors...

 

Very true. My Canon DSLR is dual core, for example. ARM chipset. Kinda funny. Saves RAW images at 2x the speed