quad vs dual, 2 vs 3

Q2.0 vs D2.8


4GB ddr3 vs 6gb ddr2



FLAME WAR! GOGOGO

 

2.0gHz quad and 6GB DDR2

But thats just me

 

why do you think that?

 

Quad 2.0 = 2.0GHz x 4 = 8.0GHz
Dual 2.8 = 2.8GHz x 2 = 5.6GHz

Q2.0 > d2.8

I'm not sure on the ram

 

it doesn't exactly work that way. its 2.0GHz total, and 2.8GHz total. its not 2.0 Per-core.

 

quad - 4 threads, no bottlenecking in single threadded games since the majority only need about 2ghz anyway, quad can run more things simult without any hastle!

 

is it possible to turn two cores off, so i can just run in dual-core mode, and overclock to 2.5?

 

I dont know... it just seemed nice.
honestly a system with the quad can support the qx9300 so i would end up with 2.53 quad vs 2.8 dual

But really just because it seemed nice

It doesnt work in any way like this...

 

That's a really inaccurate way of computing the processing power, but you are correct that the quad has much more power.

This all depends, really. Is cost factored in? What purpose will the machine in question be used for?

For example, if the laptop will be used for video encoding, the quad core is beyond a doubt a better choice. If it will be used for gaming, however, you should factor in that many games do not support more than 2 cores, so the 2.8GHz dual core could perform better than the 2.0GHz quad. If you have the money, though, you should still go with the quad for 2 reasons: 1.- games are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so even if the game cannot utilize more than 2 cores, you should be okay, and 2.- future games will be more likely to support multicore systems.

Also, 4GB of DDR3 RAM is far cheaper than 6GB of DDR2 RAM, and could be marginally faster and use less power (depending on the RAM). If, however, you are running multiple VMs, more RAM could be more beneficial than a slight increase in speed. In the vast majority of uses, however, I would say that there's not much point in going past 4GB of RAM - the cost is just not worth it (unless you have a desktop or laptop with 3 or more slots for RAM, but that's rare in laptops).

 

its because I'm going between the ASUS G71GX-A1 and the sager 8662


Using it for Gaming. I already have three games "arrrrrrrr"chived. FEAR2, DOOM3, and PROTOTYPE. Will be getting Crysis soon. I want to be able to play the most advanced games in the future, like Arkham Asylum (for example)

 

The only games that quads really effect atm are GTA4 and Supreme Commander. Personally I think a quad is a waste unless you have specific reasons for wanting one (like the above mentioned encoding features). All that said, I tend to like Sagers more than ASUS notebooks. Up to you and the price.

 

Most games are GPU limited, not CPU limited. Quads will only be really better than duals with more than 2 threads @ 100%. Otherwise the other cores are just idle doing nothing.

 

the prices are the same. anywho, PEople don't seem to realize my question.

the quad is more powerful- it can run all games on the market. correct? and it should be able to play any Dual-core game ever. correct? I will have this laptop for years to come. Will a 2.8 duo be able to keep up with the quad? I don't want to know about NOW, i want to know about LLATER

(btw Senior mortgage TROGDOOOOOORRRRRRR: GREAT JEARB OHMSTAIR)

 

The 2.8 GHz Dual will be faster than the 2.0 GHz Quad. The only time that Quad will be faster than that Duo is when the Quad is running 4 threads @ 100% CPU utilization.

 

in the future, how many games will be running 3 or more threads? and how close in the future? we already have 2-5 games

 

Not counting games like dinner dash, i figure most all games will be multi threaded (set to utilize 3+ cores) with in the next 2-3 years

 

I'll be getting the quad then. thanks. Is it possible to underclock two cores, and give the power to the two that ARE active?

 

Is this post a joke?

 

No, its just worded slightly off, but it means what its supposed to. Just trying to say you dont get to add the cores together to get 8gHz CPU's and such sillyness.

 

Well, in multithreaded programs that support 4 threads it does...

you asked what will be more useful in the future. the quad core will, without question.

 

Not as best as I know. And fyi, just as saying D2.8=5.6 Q2=8 is an oversimplification, saying, "unless more than 2 cores are at 100% utilization, you get no benefit out of the extra 2 cores," is an oversimplification too. Just because averaged over time, your cores re not at 100% utilization does not mean that having 4 simultaneous threads running at any instantateous moment is not granting you benefit. Plus if you have more active threads than cores, the fewer cores you have, the more overhead you incur swapping threads in and out of the different cores.

 

no it doesnt.
It means you have X cores each running at Y speeds. At no point do you "add them together"

 

But even that is not true. Just cause you have multiple threads doesn't mean that none of them ever spend time in wait state. Yes, having them spinning on a dedicated core does improve efficiency and performance, but not in the same way that having 4 times the speed on a single core would.

 

Unless you have specific software that you KNOW is heavily multi-threaded and can use 4 cores effectivly, get the faster dual core. Newer dual cores are bringing back the old two threads-per-core hyperthreading. So if you end up with one of those chips you will get some throughput gains from the hyperthreading.

I'm running a large handful of older E6850 3Gz C2D cpus. In just about everything except for Oracle and SQL Enterprise, the E6850s outperform quad cores running at between 2.3 and 2.6 Gz. I'm personally (and at work) not going to upgrade to quad cores until the 3 Gz parts come down quite a bit in price.

Of greater importance is buying and properly implementing the fastest memory your chipset will run and a real fast disd system (SSDs or Raid1 on a heavily cached specialized controller). CPUs of just about any speed sit idle most of the time waiting for data i/o from memory and disk.

 

well see, sometimes i run... multiple AIM, MSN, Vent, a game, music, and the internet at the same time..... Would a dual core still handle that?

Again like i said, I'm speaking of the future, not the present.

 

Well technically a 2.0 ghz Quad does have 4x single cores that can max out at 2.0ghz, so 4x 2.0ghz= 8.0ghz.

However, this does not mean a 2.0ghz quad is as fast a 8.0ghz single or a 4.0ghz c2d.

What this means is that for programs with multi-core support the work is distributed over 4 cores instead of 2 or 1. This means that the quad will actually run slower if it's utilizing only 2 cores compared to a higher clocked c2d.

When the 3rd core comes into play the c2d would effectively get bogged down, where the quad would continue trucking along.

A very basic analogy that's only mildly accurate would be the tortoise(quad) vs the hare(c2d). When you're got a short distance to go the hare will definitely out sprint the tortoise, but over a long distance that tortoise will outwork the hare.

On the other hand, a qx9300 and above will smoke any c2d out there.

Edit: and the ram part, definitely 6gb ddr2 > 4gb ddr3. There has been little shown performance difference between ddr2 ram and ddr3 ram (not to be mistaken for GPU ram, which does make a huge difference). An extra 50% more ram with outperform the 5-10% upgrade from ddr2 to ddr3.

 

a 2.8gHz dual would pretty easily support all of that (at the same time even assuming your game doesnt require 100% CPU usage at all times)

But the quad would better future proof your system (know that i HATE using that term as everything in computers is so quickly outdated)

 

That's good information...except that he is talking games. Games are designed to hit the HD and other i/o as little as possible specifically to avoid that bottleneck. For gaming, as has been said, most games are GPU bound in any case, but the few that benefit from CPU right now benefit from multicore environments over speed boosts. As more and more mutithreaded games hit the market in the coming years, I'd expect to continue to see boosts in perf from mulitple cores over higher speeds.

In games, threads seem to be leveraged to allow things like more and more AI entities (more enemies), more objects being pushed through the physics engine, and other things like that. In a real time environment, you aren't looking for maximizing CPU utilization like you are in an enterprise environment, you are looking to maximize throughput. From that perspective, 4 cores being utilized in full parallel 25% of the time to boost overall performance by 5%-10% is more significant than 2 cores being utilized 90% of the time with a 3%-8% perf boost, even though the cost/benefit doesn't work out with that sort of thing in a corporate environment.

 

will the FPS loss be noticable to the eye? i mean,

CoD4 still at 100+
Fear and doom 3 still at 50+?
WoW still at 30+ (avg)?

 

so i'd benefit from....... a Dual?

 

A better annalogy would be having a 4 lane highway @ 50MPH vs a 2 lane highway @ 70 MPH, with trucks representing threads. If you have a high enough volume of trucks/threads, more lanes/cores will translate to faster performance, but if you only have a couple trucks, the 2 lane highway will be faster.

 

Depends on the app and environment. But personally, I'd go quad, as games tend to be reliant on parallelism to deliver a realtime experience rather than to maximize resource utilization, so a faster, lower number of cores is less helpful than more, slower cores. As we move in to the future, I would say the relative benefit will shift more and more in favor of the quad over the dual.

 

Ah, forgot about that one. An oldey, but a goody. Odd though, that's how we used to discuss FSB, and now it's being used on cores...oh how technology progresses.

@Melina: If you like to play "simple" games like FPS and RPGs then the c2d will most likely perform better for you. If you enjoy complex games like simulators, large world games (GTA IV) and RTS's than the quad will likely perform better.

 

how exactly do threads work?


oh, i see. newer FPS will need quads though too, right? Crysis and far-cry2 are kinda pushin it. I like games like oblivion and such as well. Gta4, i played for 360 so that doesnt factor for me.


before when i mentions FPS loss, i meant frames, not first persons

 

That's probably the best short and sweet synopsis on the subject anyone has given yet. The caveat of course is that as developers get used to having more and more objects in thier physics engines and more and more AI routines going simultaneously, I'd expect more cores to show benefits in shooters as well.

 

I think an upcoming game that will determine the route of FPS will be AVP3. If any game should be able to utilize lots of crap on the screen in an fps it should be this game, if it's made right. That, and Crysis 2 will be a good benchmark was to whether the C2D are going to be replaced by quads entirely.

Edit: Bottom line: You won't see much of a noticeable drop in performance for 2 core games on the 2.0 quad (because even a 2.0 c2d is still a decent processor), but on the cpu heavy games you'll see a fairly large improvement. Game developers base things off the latest technology so it's likely you'll see more and more multicore support. IMO any game that doesn't support multicores by Q3 2010 is going to be obsolete. Personally I would always go with the newer tech (quad) because that's what the latest and greatest games are going to be utilizing. You might lose 5-10 fps in COD4, or 1000 points in 3dmark, but you'll get more out of it in the long run.

 

Quads will be the future. However, the question is if that current 2.0 GHz quad will still be good fast enough to run those complex multi-threaded games. When quads become necessary, your current quad may already be outdated to run those newer games. That is why "future-proofing" is kind of hopeless.

My AMD CPU in my desktop is already faster than an Intel Q9650. Then my AMD CPU is going to be killed by the next Intel or AMD chip.

 

It barely beats the q9650, and the intel i7 Smokes it (for an additional $750).

 

Think of it like this. Let's say you have the task of building a table, and you start with a pile of wood and some nails. Now let's think of threads as different "chuncks" of the job (cut the wood in to this piece or that, nail them together this way or that, etc etc) and the number of cores as the number of people that you have to work on the project.

The simplest (though slowest) way to do things is to have one set of instructions and one person who does the whole thing, one task at a time, from start to finish. This would be like having a single threaded application running on a single core CPU.

Now let's say we break the job up in to a number of discreet tasks (threads). Now you have a job of cutting a leg that gets done 4 times, a job of cutting boards for the top, one for nailing subassemblies together, and so on. However, if you only have one person to do the job, you now actually decrease performance, as you have the overhead of managing all these different sets of plans on top of doing the work itself. However, if you get a couple more people to come and help out, you can devide the work out among the different people (cores) to get the task done faster.

Now you can also have people that are more efficient at doing tasks (a faster core), but at some point, they will never be faster than just having more people.

Hopefully, this gives you a way to start understanding how threads and cores relate to eachother. Just because you have more cores doesn't mean things go any faster, becuase you can have fewer units of work available than there are cores.

 

so, the 2.0 question still stands, it can oc to 2.5 someone said, so go with the quad i'm guessing is what everyone is saying?

 

should this be a sticky? haha

 

ViciousXUSMC got his to OC to 2.8ghz in the Asus W90, but it depends on the Bios...and Clevo tends to limits their OC ability. And yes, I'm saying go with the Quad.

 

The clockspeed wars have largely ended. Everything these days is becoming about architecture and number of cores. You can only physically push things so small (and thus fast) before you run in to the physical limits of the universe (or at least what is cost effective to produce). Notice how we've been around the same range of clock speeds on CPUs for the past year or 2? Expect to see that trend continue.

Edit: As a corallary to the clockspeed wars ending, software engineering and design is all about being massively parallel these days to exploit the preponderance of cores available on modern systems. What this means to all of us is that more cores (and better thread management hardware) will slowly but surely become ever more important when compared to faster clocks.

 

will frames per second on already-existing games be hindered by a quad core? if so, will it be a drastic difference?

 

It depends on the game. Most older games are GPU dependent or only require a 2.0 c2d at max. This means you'll either see no change, or an improvement. On anything else, I doubt you'll see more than a 2-4% drop in frames which is very insignificant.

 

how do you know what program has however many threads?

 

The box on the game will generally say "optimized for multiple cores". Or if you're running the game you can use RMclock to monitor core usage while the program's running.

 

Before you toss in your $$ for a quad or dual, do some external reading about the programs you will be running. IF they can take full advantage of a quad, get a quad. If they don't, then get the faster dual.

At some point you're going to have to do research outside of the forums here.

I personally think that the faster quads are way over priced.

YMMV, etc.

 

Except you can't research things that haven't been released yet.

 

lets get this straight...


in the future i will have better use of a quad core because games are starting to use more AI and Large-world functions (or whatever, you get the idea), which require more threads. the game might be GPU-based, but i still need the quad to run all those threads

I won't lose that much FPS from having a quad vs a dual. I can OC the 2.0 to a 2.5 on the asus, making it faster...

so even though the 2.8 is faster, i get more usage from the 2.0 from what i am/will be doing?