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Do More Cores Beat More Clock Speed?

04:50 - Wednesday 8 August 2007 by The editorial team
Source: THG – Keywords: extreme, fsb, 2
Categories: Hardware

Extreme FSB 2: The Quad-Core Advantage?

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Nearly everyone who’s followed CPU technology over the past two years knows that quad cores have a distinct performance advantage in a wide variety of professional applications, because many applications are designed for multi-threading. These same readers also know that the four-core advantage virtually evaporates in games, because games usually support only a single thread and occasionally two, but not four.

Builders who use both games and multi-threaded applications must ponder which processor choice provides the greatest overall benefit to their usage patterns, but they’d better be careful whom they ask for advice. Many so-called "experts" will always recommend a slower-clocked four-core CPU such as the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 rather than a faster and cheaper dual-core such as the Core 2 Duo E6750, even to builders who use their machines exclusively for games!

Overclocking could easily put the Quad Core on top in games as well as applications - or could it? Several members of Tom’s Hardware Forums would say "just overclock the Q6600 to E6750 speed" without considering that the E6750 can be overclocked too, and the sad fact is that dual cores usually overclock better than quads.

When overclocking, the final question is whether a maxed-out Core 2 Quad can approach the gaming performance of a fully-overclocked Core 2 Duo of the same generation. Diminishing the Core 2 Quad’s frequency handicap would make its higher IPC in multithreaded applications an overwhelming reason to choose the higher-cost part.

We were fortunate enough to receive a Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad using the same G0 stepping revision to aid in our quest.


Talkback

Leftfield42 09/08/2007 12:33
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Leftfield42
Er, it might just be me, but where are the piccies??
blade85 09/08/2007 02:19
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blade85
haha, i dont see them either
skyline0511 10/08/2007 10:08
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skyline0511
Try disabling your adblock plus if ur using firefox. Others disable any ad blocker
Cabelo 10/08/2007 12:25
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Cabelo
Can anyone still not see them? They seem to be alright now...
CJJE 15/08/2007 07:06
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CJJE
Like many flight sim enthusiasts, I am trying to decide the most cost-effective CPU for FSX SP1. This can use multi-cores we're told but reports suggest not that well.

Could you add FSX SP1 (under Vista) to your benchmarks for CPUs please? I am particularly interested to know whether the E6850 is better than the Q6600 or not!

Note You are going to post a comment as anonymous.



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