Real life difference? Should I upgrade from Q6700 at 3gig to a Corei5 Quad

[Queelis]

Yep price is already dropped @ Scan, but they won't ship until the 1st of august!! I have my shopping basket full, just waiting for the nice students loan people to put the money in my bank!!

New i7 rig purely for educational purposes!!!

You do realize that loans are supposed to be paid back, right? Just making sure

[Li4m79]

You do realize that loans are supposed to be paid back, right? Just making sure

haha yeah i know..... i'm a mature student, with 3 kids, so a wee bit more sensible when it comes to my finances..............................


although I feel about 12 at the thought of getting this setup!!!!

[Crevan]

I didn't want to make a new thread for a similar question, so I hope Zak doesn't mind me asking it here.

I expect to be doing a lot of MATLAB work for my research degree in the coming years, and judging by preliminary experiments I've done, the calculations can run for hours on my Q6600 @ 3.6 GHz. So my question is, if I decided to upgrade to an i7 (or perhaps the new AMD hexacore), would there be a noticeable performance boost?

[watercooled]

With something CPU-intensive like MATLAB you would definitely see an improvement, but whether it would be worth the upgrade is for you to decide. I'm not sure how that program scales (or if it's multithreaded?) but you'd be looking at something like doubling the speed IMO rather than cutting it down to minutes.

[Crevan]

My code is not multithreaded, but most probably can be rewritten to be such. And if by "doubling the speed" you mean halving the execution time, I'd be more than happy with such a result.

[sammorris]

The difference between a 3Ghz Q6700 and a stock i5 is about 20%. So it's that compounded by however much you overclock your i5 to. Mine was pretty easy to get to 4.1Ghz, so that's about a 90% increase. However, are you going to use it? Few games need more CPU power than a 3Ghz Q6700 can offer, the only examples I can think of being Crysis Warhead (which needs a hefty GPU for you to notice anyway) and GTA4.

Lol at student loan discussion, same for me, student loan is not for living, it's for hardware. As are student overdrafts

[Li4m79]

Lol at student loan discussion, same for me, student loan is not for living, it's for hardware. As are student overdrafts

if this were facebook, i'd like this comment!! (i just ordered a wii for the misses too so i don't get the guilts for my i7!!)

[kingpotnoodle]

My code is not multithreaded, but most probably can be rewritten to be such. And if by "doubling the speed" you mean halving the execution time, I'd be more than happy with such a result.

If you already have a quad core but no multi-threaded code then it sounds like you could achieve far more performance from looking at your code than your hardware!

Matlab not compatible with CUDA yet?

[kalniel]

If you already have a quad core but no multi-threaded code then it sounds like you could achieve far more performance from looking at your code than your hardware!

It's a question of time though - if you spend a fortnight optimising (and debugging/testing) something that already works then it might have been cheaper to just buy an upgrade.

[edgars70]

Have a read of this article

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...core,2717.html

[Crevan]

Matlab not compatible with CUDA yet?

Matlab does work with CUDA in some cases, but since I have no idea how to write code with it yet, I'll have to leave CUDA for the future.

And thanks for the link, Edgars! This is just what I needed.