Yes I'm with you. I've been waiting to order one of these, think the E8400 will tide me over nicely until nehalem comes along to blow the yorkfield quads out of the water.Originally Posted by Salazaar
Or more likely given my upgrading track record, whatever comes along after nehalem - I'm still hobbling along with a single core A64 3200 !
You can find exceptions to every rule. I am sure there are people who can make full use of 8GB RAM. I am sure you can find people who can make full use of 5TB of storage. Yet it is not unlikely that it is overkill for the majority.
Quad core is no exception. If you find yourself running multiple games simultaneously while encoding video, and folding at the same time, then by all mean. However, I am on the same page as EtheAv8r in regard to 'future proofing'. If you are looking to build the fastest gaming rig for the money, do not intend to run tons of other wares, then dual core actually make sense. By the time games fully make use of quad core, whatever is available today cease to be good buy.
We've had this argument about single core/dual core 2-3 years ago. Dual core make sense today under almost all circumstances (~60% improvement over single core in modern games assuming no graphic bottlenecks - on top of aiding multitasking) but it didn't back when X2 first appeared. People who got the X2 got minimum (if any) improvement over single core at the same clockspeed so the real benefit was if multitasking is taken into account. Without that, it made more sense to wait till Core 2 when a greater number of games started taking advantage of it.
This is how I see quad-core today (Anandtech did a test and you are looking about ~10% advantage from going dual to quad for a modern game). You absolutely have to multitask like Zak does, and find the benefit of being able to multitask like that worthy of the price premium for you to go quad core. Personally, I do not value multitasking to that extent as much as Zak, hence a quad core has a lower perceived value to me.
That's not to say that I wouldn't get a quad core today if it was available. It simply mean that it needs to be at the right price relative of dual cores available. For me that value is around £120-125 for a Q6600.
No doubt that once quad-core is well optimised for applications, and it becomes the norm,we'll have the same debate about Quad core vs Hex/Oct core CPU. Some people will be able to justify it through intense multitasking. In some way, you can never have hardware that is too powerful. But I think it makes sense to weight the value/need of the added power versus the costs.
Last edited by TooNice; 18-01-2008 at 08:04 PM.
It's a shame they raised the price of the Q6600 a few weeks back.
When it was £145 it was superb value for money. My mate bit the bullet and got his. With his thermalright extreme he is running 3.6GHz no problem and it does get to 3.8GHz which is frankly rediculous
Oh and he uses this fan which actually as far as we can tell compeletly lives up to it's sepcs
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
He only got stable at 3.8GHz with this fan, suprisingly it couldn't be done with the S-FLEX 1600 and the xigmatek seemed quieter to.
great fan, thoroughly recommended.
godsdog (18-01-2008),j.o.s.h.1408 (18-01-2008)
That's the issue I have when trying to decide. I won't multi-task anywhere near Zakk33 so a C2D would be the way forward, but I really want to be hitting 4ghz+ with one. Ideally the E8400 at 500Mhz fsb @4.5Ghz. I've seen this done on air! with Engineering Samples but I'm waiting to see if this is going to be generally possible before I get one, otherwise I'll get a Q6600 when the Q9450 comes out and overclock that and be happy with my lot for another year or two just like my opty 146
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
I wonder how many Q6600 manage 3.6Ghz. Yes you will see a lot of them online, but I reckon that you are more likely to hear amazing OC than mediocre ones being talked about.
That Xigmatek seems interesting though. I am pondering the idea of getting a Scythe Slipstream, but it's not exactly cheap.
Look forward to trying the Xigmatek spinnyround thing out too. If the Q9450 gets to sub £190 quickly, I'll bite, if not, then Q6600 will do just fine.
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"Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants and slide on the ice"
the q9450 at its current price is fine. £220 for a cpu that is around 20% faster then a q6600 and uses less power, less heat and therefore better OC?
i take a q9450 any day and btw that fan looks cool.do they do a LED light on it?
Last edited by j.o.s.h.1408; 18-01-2008 at 11:16 PM.
Nah, it's not. Sourced from the motherboard manufacturers a month ago, their inside track had the Q9450 pegged at around £160. Then Intel decided they had no real reason to knock themselves out. There's an aircraft carrier of room for movement on that £220.
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"Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants and slide on the ice"
Lack of adequate competition does these things :/
2008 has so far been excellent value wise for RAM and GFX cards, but I've not been as impressed for CPUs and motherboards (yes I remember when CPU used to be even more expensive - yet I also remember the amazing value of an XP2500+ back then).
And there we have it.
Because AMD are so poor, Intel are charging wy over the odds and can get away with it as the competition is non-existent.
I have been waiting for these new cores so i can upgrade but Intel can poke it now.
Until they stop taking the piddle they arent getting my cash.
Remeber the Q6450 has an 8 multiplier so getting a higher overclock needs a good board which can take high fsb, some people seem to be forgetting this again.
Solid motherboard for £30 and a (very flexible) dual-core CPU for £45? I'd argue we're not that far from the Celeron 300A days.
Yeah, the high end is bit of a different story, but if you do any real number crunching then I'd say £160 for a quad is bit of a bargain. Was waiting on Premier encoding a DVD for 22hrs at work last week on an AMD X2 - my C2D did it in 7hrs, and if I had a quad it would be about 4hrs.
I'd say things are moving along nicely still and depending on how you work there's plenty of bargains in the CPU market still. The problem is, people generally just don't need quads - it's a still very much a niche product in many senses, but most people just want to get the best CPU and expect to pay nothing for it.
yea, running lineage 2 clients takes a lot of mem and cpu. I used to do that on my athlon 2700 but it would be slow if I ran anything else.I regularly maxed out a dual, and so Quad made sense.
Try this: Internet Explorer (or Firefox in my case) with several tabs. Media Player. Skype in use with mates online gaming. 2 Spread sheets and a Word Document. Now boot Lineage 2 (or WoW) and set it to trade in a market town, and then Alt TAb out. Now boot IL-2 1946 or any other game, with the game browser needed, and fly a mission and then, when you crash and you're waiting for your mates, Alt Tab out to surf.
And all the time....Folding
I love my quad. It is awesome.
Sorry to take this slightly off topic, but am I right in thinking that the next gen quads (nehalem?) won't be socket LGA775 compatible, or if they are, they'll have an integrated memory controller so will need an entirely new motherboard anyway?
to bring it back to the core2 vs quad discussion, my thinking had been to buy a cheap core2 now and then upgrade to a quad when the socket was going out of use. would be helpful to know cash wise when that'll be!
I imagine almost all which don't use the crud stock HSF. I built two systems recently, mine, and a friends. My Q6600 goes to 3.7GHz on an Ultima-90i at about 65 C load on all cores, and the friend's goes to 3.8GHz on an Ultima-90i at about 68 C load. 24/7 folding for weeks stable. Maybe we were just lucky.. but I doubt they are of the same batch as the PC's were made about 3months apart and from different retailers.
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