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

Moppie wrote in post #4439187
Cool, let us know what it shows. Be interesting to see if the power usage changes depending on what you are doing to.

Well, I put the energy meter on this afternoon and did some quick tests.


Sitting idle in windows (vista x64) = ~170W
Running Crysis = ~220W

That's only the box - not including the monitor/etc.

Specs at the moment:
Q6600 CPU overclocked to 3GHz
4GB RAM
4 x SATA HDDs (1 x 10,000rpm, 3 x 7,200rpm)
SATA DVD/RW
Areca 1220 RAID card
8600GT graphics card
5 x 120mm fans
Seasonic S12+ 650W PSU

Shame I didn't do it last week, when there was an 8800GTX and another 3 HDDs in there.

I tested it with a known power-level device (a 2400W kettle) and it seems reasonably accurate.

Cheers Mat, so it seems 800 is more than enough

i have just bought the AMD Athlon 6000+ and 4GB of memory with a giga-byte motheboard and ATI HD 2400 graphic and i see they are more then enough

Well its working!

Just have to figure out how to access and configure the router, get the firewall working etc, and then have to get all the extra drives formated, and then get all the data of my old drivers.


But, its quading along quite nicely.

Moppie wrote in post #4455224
Well its working!

...............and then get all the data of my old drivers.

Copy! Copy all the data off my old hard drives...

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #4458850
Copy! Copy all the data off my old hard drives...

I'm going to blame vista for that one

Well, I finally have it all working with Dual boot of Vista and XP.
There is a little program called EasyBCD that makes it very easy.

I'm liking Vista, and but I'm liking my skynet killing Quad Core more

Just have to get robocopy to run so I can retrieve all my photos, and keep back ups on the two 500gb drives.

However, when I ever I run it, it opens a window then closes it again......

It's common to have diesel cars in Europe since fuel is very expensive here and consumption on diesel cars is quite lower than than in petrol cars.
Diesel engines are a bit more expensive (around 2.000-3.000 EUR more than their equivalent petrol versions), and taxes are quite higher for diesel cars, so it's a matter of how many Kms you drive a year.

In my particular case I chose diesel. The final decision was taken according to the fact that mechanically speaking Alfa Romeo (my car's brand) produces fantastic diesel engines (Fiat Group JTD), while their equivalent petrol versions (Alfa Romeo Twin Spark Injection) are not so recommended even if they are not bad engines.

Regards.

_GUI_ wrote in post #4463280
It's common to have diesel cars in Europe since fuel is very expensive here and consumption on diesel cars is quite lower than than in petrol cars.
Diesel engines are a bit more expensive (around 2.000-3.000 EUR more than their equivalent petrol versions), and taxes are quite higher for diesel cars, so it's a matter of how many Kms you drive a year.

In my particular case I chose diesel. The final decision was taken according to the fact that mechanically speaking Alfa Romeo (my car's brand) produces fantastic diesel engines (Fiat Group JTD), while their equivalent petrol versions (Alfa Romeo Twin Spark Injection) are not so recommended even if they are not bad engines.

Regards.

lol ok.... i ll keep that in mind...

Well the Dual boot works!

I have all my photos mirriored on two drives, plus a removable back up with the help of robocopy

I'm liking Vista

Next step is going to be installing PS3 and seeing just how fast it will batch process.

Thanks to everyone who helped, and offered advice, both on the forum and over the phone.

Ok, did a little bit of photo sorting, and tried a batch conversion just for the hell of it.

With CS3 open, I grabbed 13 30D RAW files in bridge, and opened them. Then converted all of them to 16bit Tiff. It took as long to process all 13 on the new PC, as it would have taken to convert 1, on the old PC.
Oh, and while it was working I watched a video on YouTube.

It used all 4 cores, but never got above 73% of total capacity and only used 60% of the RAM.


If your looking for a smoking hot Image processor, then a Quad Core, CS3 and Vista, with lots of RAM will be more than adequate!
Infact watching the performance monitor while my g/f was playing Two Worlds, I think I could have batch converted all my RAW files while she played, not noticed any difference in game performance.

very nice - thanks for the results - hmm may need to buy some parts..

Just another update for those interested.

I used Lightroom to export about 200 RAW files as jpegs last night. It went so quickly and easily I forgot to open the task manager and check how it was performing.
It certianly took a fraction of the time it used to, it was all over and done with in only a few minutes.

I'll try and do some informal, and unscientific benchmarking if anyone is interested.

The higher clock speed Core2Dual processors are actually outperforming the Core2Quads at lower clock speeds. Many synthetic and actual benchmarks are available:

http://www23.tomshardw​are.com/cpu_2007.html

The difference is minute though. Hopefully the next generation of software will be geared better for quad core support. You can't go wrong w/ an Intel C2D or C2Q processor right now though... the highest level AMD Phenom (2.66 ghz quad core) processor was performing below the C2Q Q6600 (2.4 ghz quad core) in most cases.

Notamage wrote in post #4523738
The higher clock speed Core2Dual processors are actually outperforming the Core2Quads at lower clock speeds. Many synthetic and actual benchmarks are available:

I noticed that (I did a lot of reading before hand )

It appears for single application and gaming use, in software or OS that only surports 1 or 2 cores, the Dual Core chips are faster.

So for internet, word processing, and low-mid range gaming, I think they money would be better spent on a dual core chip.
Even a 2ghz one will preform quite happily.

Infact if my old system hadn't fallen over from multiple hardware failures, I would not have considered up-grading. Despite it being a bit slow (ok it used more than a little coal and water) at batch processing, it did work.


However, for multitasking and heavy processing while working in a software and OS environment that surports more than 2 cores, quad core is deffinitly faster.