What will be better, a 6600 Intel Quad core processor PC or another top of the range Dual Core PC?

Question

As title really, just imagine they both had exactly the same spec as one another bar the different processors.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

Firts off, please ignore that garbage Todd was saying about multiple copies of XP, not sure where he got that from.

If they were exactly the same speeds, then quite obviously the choice would be go with the quad core. The thing that makes it tricky is that you can usually get a faster dual core than quad core. I would recommend quad core, not so much for right now, because only a few programs will take advantage of it, but people seem to forget that when you buy a computer you will have it for a few years, and a few years from now almost everything will be multithreaded, and you will be kicking yourself for not going with the quad core.

Answer 2

The choice is obvious. The Intel quad core. 4 pretty much beats 2. Actually the Intel version of the quad core really is two dual cores put together. When AMD releases their quad core, it actually is a quad core. The ones that fail will become triple cores.

Answer 3

Keep in Mind Windows 32bit ONLY supports 2 CPU's at a time. And if you have 4 you have to purchase 2 copies of Windows to activate it, but even then it still only activates 2 at a time...

Higher L2 Cache, RAM Speed that matches the BUS Speed and a BUS speed no slower than 2.5x's that of the CPU. That's called Speed matching, it's what you do when you build a server. Keep your math this way and you'll do OK. 3.06ghz on a 1300 bus with 1066ram is about as fast as 2.66 on a 1066 with 1066 ram. Reason is the flow rate is smoother on the lesser machine which requires less stop/start cycles on the bus thus the L2 cache doesn't fill up as fast leaving the flow rate even.

Also with all that CPU power your bottleneck is still going to be the Hard Drives so RAID 1 is a must have. 0+1 would be great too, Hardware only - No software RAIDS as they will slow it down tremendously.

Answer 4

Depends on the application and the clock speed, a 2.9Ghz core 2 duo out perform a 2.6Ghz core quad if the program dosen't support multithreading.

Answer 5

if your just playing games then a core2duo aprox 3ghz is a good choice

but if you do stuff like video-edit then this is where the quad-core shines

Answer 6

quad would have a higher throughput but you really need to be asking yourself if you would be using any applications that would need such performance?