Dual Core vs Quad Core? Wood vs Coal? Petrol vs Diesel?

Well its time I upgraded my PC.
I'm getting tired of shoveling coal into it, and the soot build up on the ceiling is up setting my better half.
Its also developed a rather annoying habit of crashing randomly, usually when I least want it to.
It has however served me well. Its a self built AMD athalon 2600XP in a Gigabyte board with 1-1.5gb of ram (depends if the ram slot is working or not, currently its not) and an ATI Radeon 9550 for the odd bit of gaming.

I have a good case, a collection of SATA and IDE hard drivers, a DVD burner and card reader. So all I need is a new CPU, m/b, ram and graphics card. (The old M/B is having issues, the sort that drugs just won't solve).

I'm also on a budget, about NZ$1,000 or US$750 (you knew that was coming)
It will be running XP to start with, up-grading to Vista sometime next year when some vista only software comes out (i.e a game for the better half).

So far I'm looking at 2gb of Crucial DDR2 800 ram. (thats easy)
I can add more ram later as the budget allows, i.e. after xmass.

A Radeon 2600XT graphics card (the better half likes her games).
I need something moderately good, not screaming hot fast, but enough for to play a high end FPS with average ability (thats also pretty easy).

So that leaves the problem of m/b and CPU. (this isn't easy)

Which is where the questions start?

Anyone want to predict the life span of the LGA775 socket?
I got screwed by AMD's Socket A, very limited range of options there.
LGA775 seems to be the most popular at the moment, but will it still be around in 2 years when some smoking hot new CPU comes out?
Or is it even worth worrying about. Just up grade CPU, M/B, ram and graphics again in 2-3 years.


Dual Core vs Quad Core?
1333mhz FSB vs 1033mhz FSB?

For about the same money I can get a 3ghz Core 2 Duo with 1333mhz FSB, or a Q6600 Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz with 1033mhz FSB.

Clearly the dual core has two much faster cores than the quad core, but the quad core has twice as many cores.

75% of my PC time is spent online with CS2 open. I tend to edit and surf at the same time. The rest of the time is gaming.
Is having 4 slower cores going to make things better than having 2 faster cores?
Its a bit like having 4 Mini's vs 2 Ferraris

Or, do I take sneak at AMD, I have heard a rumour, and its about time, they are about to release some new processors and leap frog ahead of Intel.

I'm not looking for bleeding edge performance, just something a little better than the average to give it a good life span, something simple and most importantly stable.

Personally i'm more concerned about throughput, for batch conversions and the like, so i'd go for quad core. Any modern CPU will keep up with general day to day tasks. If you play lots of graphical FPS games that's about the only time you'd want the dual core i'd say, but since multicore's becoming more common games will pretty soon be optimised for either - it just takes time since multicore programming is kinda tricky.

tim wrote in post #4405580
Personally i'm more concerned about throughput, for batch conversions and the like, so i'd go for quad core.

So the question then is: Will XP and CS2 make use of all 4 cores?
Or do I need Vista and CS3?

I have to ask because I have yet to use a multi-core PC where I could actually tell it was faster than my steam engine.
I even used a dual core intel (2.4ghz) instead of my PC for a week, did my usually PS processing, Raw conversion etc, and never noticed a difference.

I don't know for sure, but I know batch conversions in CS3 on XP use 100% of my two cores. Someone with CS3 and quad core could probably work it out pretty easily. I don't have access to a quad core machine, and I think my Dual Core Athlon 4800+ is going to go strong for another year or so - since I found the cause of the smoke that was coming out of it...

tim wrote in post #4405648
since I found the cause of the smoke that was coming out of it...

I thought the smoke was normal?


I'm find some interesting stuff online.
It appears that the vast majority of current generation programs will run faster on a high clock speed Dual Core chip, simply because they were not designed to run with more than 2 cores, and XP isn't really good at handling 4 cores.
However, under vista programs like CS3 do run faster on the quad core, 10% faster seems to be an average number. Apparently vista does some clever stuff with the dual L2 cache on the quad core.
The journalistic opinion also seems to be that the quad core will be a better future proofing bet.
Apparently with the right m/b and cooling, the Q6600 is easily over clocked to close to 3ghz, but thats something I'm still reading up on. It also looks like a good way to break things.

All I can say here is that I have a Quad processor, Q6600, Sata drive, 4GB Ram, ATI 2400XT and under XP it ran like a Donkey on 3 legs no better than any other mainstream PC. Under Vista 64bit Ultimate it's like a Ferrari. So O/S plays a big part on these new processors.
It's a work PC so can't comment on image processing speeds and s/w compatibility, sorry.

I just did the exact upgrade you're talking about, replacing an AMD Athlon 2600+ that I'd been running since 2003. Three words: Newegg DOT com!

MSI K9N4 SLI motherboard,
AMD Athlon X2 5600+ Windsor Dual-Core processor,
4 (yes, 4!) GB A-data DDR2 PC6400 RAM,
XFX GeForce 8600GT 256MB video card, and
Pantone Huey Color Calibrator (while I'm upgrading, why not?)

Total cost... less than $550USD.

Newegg.com

Well here's four words:

He aint in America.

If gaming is important to you, spread the budget a little and get the nvidia 8800GT. I've seen them recently for just over US$200. It will absolutely destroy the card you have spec'd, and it's not that much more. I'd also suggest quad-core over dual-core as I think either will handle anything out now just fine, but the quad should be a little more futureproof. CS3 will take advantage of all 4 cores.

GTriever wrote in post #4406450
I just did the exact upgrade you're talking about, replacing an AMD Athlon 2600+ that I'd been running since 2003. Three words: Newegg DOT com!

Total cost... less than $550USD.

My 2600+ is about the same age, was a very, very good chip in its day.
I'm thinking of a change to Intel though, from all I have seen they are a lot better than the current

lennythelens wrote in post #4406180
So O/S plays a big part on these new processors.

Ahh, thank you very much. That is the sort of info I have been looking for.
It means if I go Quad core, i will need to use Vista to get the most out of it.

prime80 wrote in post #4406593
If gaming is important to you, spread the budget a little and get the nvidia 8800GT. I've seen them recently for just over US$200.

What about the Nvidia 8600 range?
The 8800 still seem to have a bit of a price premium on them here.

I would love to able to get parts from the US, and I most likely could order them online. However, by the time I pay postage and local import tax, it works out about the same price, but if something goes wrong there is no local surport. I have to pull it all apart and put in the post to send it back.

cosworth wrote in post #4406472
Newegg.com

Well here's four words:

He aint in America.

Fortunatly I have access to a local wholesaler. Not always Newegg prices, but usualy pretty close

Moppie, I built a new machine recently. In my research I found that the fastest Intels were indeead a fair bit faster than the fastest AMDs. But when I satrted comparing prices I found that for the price of a mid range Intel CPU I could buy a top of the range AMD. So bang for buck was better for an AMD at the price point I was looking at. (That was a few months ago, so the equation may have changed again!)
I got an AMD X2 6000, All in one mother board, 4Gb RAM, 3x 320Gb SATA2 Hard Drives etc.......you can build a box pretty cheaply these days.
I built the box to use as a VMware server for study purposes, but it has since transmogrified (I got that word from John Banks!) into a dual purpose VMware server\HTPC. I have added a Nvidia 8400GS (Not brilliant games performance, but is HDCP compliant so I can plug it into my 42" LCD play HD DVDs) and an xbox 360 HD DVD drive.
As for cpu socket. The AMDs have the memory controller on the CPU, so every time the memory technology changes, so does the socket. That is probably the main reason that intels socket hasn't changed as often as AMD lately.
Have fun!

Moppie wrote in post #4407827
What about the Nvidia 8600 range?
The 8800 still seem to have a bit of a price premium on them here.

Fortunatly I have access to a local wholesaler. Not always Newegg prices, but usualy pretty close

One thing to be aware of. If you want to use it for HD DVD or Blu-Ray play back certain versions of the 8600 are better than the 8800. They have newer HD decoding circuitry on them to decode HD content in hardware, which takes load of the CPU. I can find out which ones if interested. Oh and nvidias Vista drivers still suck! Have been wrestling with them this week to get HD DVD playback working via DMI>HDMI on my TV.

Pricespy.co.nz will ofter find you much better prices on this sort of gear than a certain un-named wholesaler.

Cheers Scott, has AMD released thier quad core CPU's yet? (I should check the "wholesaler").

I have been checking Pricespy, so far it seems to work out even, with only the dodgy fly by nighters being able to match or undercut the "wholesaler".

Moppie wrote in post #4408247
Cheers Scott, has AMD released thier quad core CPU's yet? (I should check the "wholesaler").

I have been checking Pricespy, so far it seems to work out even, with only the dodgy fly by nighters being able to match or undercut the "wholesaler".

AMD Quad cores are on pricespy

scotttnz wrote in post #4408533
AMD Quad cores are on pricespy

Ah, they are not cheap either!

Unless of course the clock speeds can't be directly compared to Intels, as per previous chips.
And of course the question then becomes, are they better?

Guess I have some more reading to do