E4500 or Q6700

[dave87]

Lo guys,

Looking at building a new PC, highlights of which will be:

Intel C2D E4500
2gb DDR2 PC6400
Gigabyte P35-DQ6
8800GTS 320mb
Scythe Ninja Plus
Seasonic S12 500w

but, Would I notice the difference between an e4500 and a q6600, and is it worth the investment now?

[ikonia]

I guess it depends what your doing, with gaming probably not, for multi tasking office/multimedia environment, probably.

[merdat]

I am a great admirer of the E4*** series jobbies. Cheap, easily overclocked . These Q thingies are very good also, but as Ikonia says , depends on what you want to do. The higher q things are really designed to be used with water cooling to get best results. E4's are very good run of the mill chips well worth the money.

[Merlin4458]

so no games are going to take advantage of the 4 cpu;s anytime soon then? V good title thread tbh, its one ive thought about

[b0ned0me]

so no games are going to take advantage of the 4 cpu;s anytime soon then?

It used to be that no games properly supported multi-core, but I believe that now X2s and C2D, C2Qs etc are becoming more common some developers are starting to make use of them. Last time I looked Crysis, the Source engine (i.e. HL2Ep2) and Flight Sim X (through a service pack) were all getting the capability to make good use of multi-core. Indeed I believe the recent Crysis hands-on events have used a quad processor. It's fair to assume that other big releases coming soon will also be multi-core.

[shaithis]

Lost Planet utilises quad cores, I think the new stalker patch will also.....crysis goes without saying.....not sure about bioshock.

Programmers are starting to use them more and more, how much they add though at the moment is not day and night. For instance, in Lost Planet the differences people are reporting are subtle, certain areas of certain maps are not subject to slow-downs the more cores you have.......normally areas with a lot of mobs......so its probably AI that mainly being shifted off at the moment.

[pauldarkside]

Originally posted here

PCGH: It is well known that your engine supports multi core CPUs. What is the maximum number of threads the engine can calculate? What is the performance gain when you play UT 3 with a quad core CPU? Will the engine even support future CPU with more than four cores?

Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3's threading support is quite scalable. We run a primary thread for gameplay, and a secondary thread for rendering. On machines with more than two cores, we run additional threads to accelerate various computing tasks, including physics and data decompression. There are clear performance benefits to quad-core, and though we haven't looked beyond that yet, I expect further gains beyond quad-core in future games within the lifetime of Unreal Engine 3.

Source

So in answer to your question, yes more games are going to be making more use of multi-core CPUs.

[Nemz0r]

so no games are going to take advantage of the 4 cpu;s anytime soon then? V good title thread tbh, its one ive thought about

There was presentation (I think by Crytek, not sure) about Single Core vs. Duo vs. Quad, in most gameplay not much difference but at points where you are blowing stuff up [in Crysis] you get more hitches on (of course) single, but also somewhat on duo compared to quad. Basically the conclusion was that quad will be worth it in the games coming in next few years (Alan Wake's Tornado comes to mind).

I think quad is definitely a good investment - but opposed to topic title I would say Q6600 G0 and not Q6700: £170 vs. £340, double the price for 11% more power?

Lost Planet utilises quad cores, I think the new stalker patch will also.....crysis goes without saying.....not sure about bioshock.

BioShock uses 2 cores on PC afaik (though in an old interview Ken Levine said it had 7 threads). However you can change an ini file to make Havok use 3 threads instead of 2. When I get my quad (waiting for P5K-E and Sennheiser PC161's to get back in stock at scan >=() i'll test .

[j.o.s.h.1408]

I think quad is definitely a good investment - but opposed to topic title I would say Q6600 G0 and not Q6700: £170 vs. £340, double the price for 11% more power?



.

can also EASILY OC a q6600 to go past the performance of a q6700

[rabbid]

dave87 what will be ur main use(s) for the pc?
would u intend to overclock?

Its about 82£ incl VAT difference E4500 to Q6600 at Scan current prices. If ur not doing anything to stress the CPU at the moment get the E4500 and get the quad as an upgrade in a year or so when it will hopefully cost a lot less, be newer stepping, etc and more apps/games will use multi cores.

Definitely agree with nemz0r and j.o.s.h tho, Q6600 not 6700 if u were to choose quad route right away