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E6850 or Q6600?


vegettoxp

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Do you really need the latest bleeding edge CPU to power your next system? The real question to ask is whether or not the CPU will be the bottleneck of your system overall.

In otherwords, will you really notice the difference between the 6850 and the 6600 or even the 6400 in real-world tasks? I'd save the extra money and put it towards a RAID0 OS drive configuration.

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Do you really need the latest bleeding edge CPU to power your next system? The real question to ask is whether or not the CPU will be the bottleneck of your system overall.

In otherwords, will you really notice the difference between the 6850 and the 6600 or even the 6400 in real-world tasks? I'd save the extra money and put it towards a RAID0 OS drive configuration.

who are you asking :rolleyes:

my opty 170 just isnt fast enough for me for some programs..

ram is a bottleneck for me too, thats why i will be getting 4gigs..

hdd has always been said to be the greatest bottleneck, i want a raptor but i cant justify its price. i can get 750gigs for that price.

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Do you really need the latest bleeding edge CPU to power your next system? The real question to ask is whether or not the CPU will be the bottleneck of your system overall.

In otherwords, will you really notice the difference between the 6850 and the 6600 or even the 6400 in real-world tasks? I'd save the extra money and put it towards a RAID0 OS drive configuration.

I got the E700 from Acer (Q6600, 2GB, 500GB, 1650SE, $734AR).

I've been pleased with the Q6600 performance so far, compared with my E6300/2.13 running at 3.2.

I run Vista MCE with 3 tuners (soon to be +2 more highdefs), 2 VMWare sessions (my WHS and my 2003 domain controller), and general gaming (with an nv8800gts/320).

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I wouldn't get a quad. No apps take full advantage of it.
That's not entirely true...at all. Systems with the capability to run two or four threads have been on the market for years. They just haven't been as readily available as they are now...nor have the systems been built around CPUs that contain all the cores in a single package. I have a Dual 3.06GHz Xeon system on my desk at work. Two CPUs + Hyperthreading = four threads at once. And trust me...I can tell the difference. I've given CPU intensive processes real time priority without impacting my normal email/web browsing/script editing tasks at all. And that's just because the OS (XP Pro in this case) handles thread priorities, not because the applications are designed to run in an SMP/SMT environment. Try giving a process real-time priority on a single-CPU, non-hyperthreaded system...you won't be able to do anything else while it's running. You'd have "fun" just trying to open the Start menu.

While the Anandtech article is a great article, it only focuses on running a single task at once, albeit they are mostly SMP/SMT aware tasks. While most people aren't power users and don't run more than one task at a time very often...it's sure nice to have that capability when you need it. Especially when that capability comes at no, or very little, cost difference.

I would just get a dual and overclock it to "quad speed". At least that way, the apps can take full advantage of it.
Considering that the dual core has a faster clock at stock speeds than the quad core, how do you overclock it to "quad speed"?
Photoshop...eh...yeah, quad core may help a bit...but again, do you do enough to justify a quad core?

Photoshop... hell no. You would be much better off getting lots of ram than a faster processor.

A fast processor only helps when applying heavy filters that require lots of math. But in general lots of RAM for Photoshop is priority number one. A fast scratch drive is priority two so swapping large chunks of memory is at a decent speed and lastly processor speed.

More than 2GB won't do you a whole lot of good if you're running 32-bit Windows. Sure, you can go up to 4GB (which is about 3.25-3.75GB usable by the OS depending on peripherals), but the processes are still limited to 2GB virtual memory. Edited by nmX.Memnoch
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who are you asking :rolleyes:

my opty 170 just isnt fast enough for me for some programs..

ram is a bottleneck for me too, thats why i will be getting 4gigs..

hdd has always been said to be the greatest bottleneck, i want a raptor but i cant justify its price. i can get 750gigs for that price.

I was asking the OP, but it's a statement in general. I've got my workstation here that I use for classic gaming, but putting in a ATI x800 AGP won't do anything for my framerates, since it's all built over a PIII and SDRAM. The Ti4200 that I've got isn't the bottleneck for this system anymore, so there's no need to upgrade it.

For most "day to day" tasks, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck of the operations. It's either network speeds (from the internet) or the hard drive. What everyday programs are too slow on your Opteron170? Would the upgrade really be worth the price? That's the real question here... :P

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Well guys after talking with my friends and thinking for 8 hours at work, I have made my decision, I am gona go with the Quad-Core Q6600 Processor and That my Final Choice. I will later next year or so will upgrade to the New 45-nm Processors. Now it time to do some Hard-Core Reviews on the Q6600 Model. Thx for all the help guys.

P.S. Fusion

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Considering that the dual core has a faster clock at stock speeds than the quad core, how do you overclock it to "quad speed"?

Simple. You keep overclocking it until you reach the scores in the benchmarks that a Q6600 does. Either that or until you reach the highest stable core. Around 4.0 GHZ from what I heard. On Air.

More than 2GB won't do you a whole lot of good if you're running 32-bit Windows. Sure, you can go up to 4GB (which is about 3.25-3.75GB usable by the OS depending on peripherals), but the processes are still limited to 2GB virtual memory.

So you run 64-bit windows instead. Problem solved.

Photoshop can take use of 4GB of ram on 64-bit. Not sure about CS3. Maybe it can use 8GB and up. It does on the Mac platform.

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Well guys after talking with my friends and thinking for 8 hours at work, I have made my decision, I am gona go with the Quad-Core Q6600 Processor and That my Final Choice. I will later next year or so will upgrade to the New 45-nm Processors. Now it time to do some Hard-Core Reviews on the Q6600 Model. Thx for all the help guys.

P.S. Fusion

May you be happy with the encoding and transcoding performance it delivers.

Good CPU. But I'd be careful and get some great cooling. It has a heat output of something like 120W vs 60W for a regular Duo.

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Considering that the dual core has a faster clock at stock speeds than the quad core, how do you overclock it to "quad speed"?

Simple. You keep overclocking it until you reach the scores in the benchmarks that a Q6600 does. Either that or until you reach the highest stable core. Around 4.0 GHZ from what I heard. On Air.

That's not even close to correct. You may get the same scores on a synthetic benchmark but you certainly aren't going to get the same performance. For starters 4 threads > 2 threads any way you slice it. Sure, you'll come into performance parity as some point, but it's at a much higher clock than you think.
More than 2GB won't do you a whole lot of good if you're running 32-bit Windows. Sure, you can go up to 4GB (which is about 3.25-3.75GB usable by the OS depending on peripherals), but the processes are still limited to 2GB virtual memory.

So you run 64-bit windows instead. Problem solved.

Photoshop can take use of 4GB of ram on 64-bit. Not sure about CS3. Maybe it can use 8GB and up. It does on the Mac platform.

32-bit applications, including Photoshop, will not use more than 4GB under a 64-bit OS. That's a limitation of the architecture, not the application.

Also, that's not that simple of a solution. Moving to Windows x64 is still a huge jump for a lot of people. There are both driver and application compatibility issues that should be researched before making the decision.

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enough about these 64bit compatibility issues that everyone is afraid of. ive been using a 64bit OS for 2 years and and first there were some drivers not available but now there are plenty of 64bit drivers. unless you plan on using a 10 year old peripheral, you should be fine.

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You know what's funny vegettoxp?

You posted the exact same 3 posts like on this page over here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.as...hreadid=2073083

One topic. Three posts by the OP. Two different sites.

Edit: NVM. Make that a third site also exactly the same.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=136338

Edited by brucevangeorge
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enough about these 64bit compatibility issues that everyone is afraid of. ive been using a 64bit OS for 2 years and and first there were some drivers not available but now there are plenty of 64bit drivers. unless you plan on using a 10 year old peripheral, you should be fine.

Who's "afraid" of the compatibility issues? It's certainly something that a person should be aware of and research before they make that decision, especially if they intend on using Windows Vista. Even the 32-bit video drivers for Windows Vista aren't entirely stable or optimized yet. For that matter, Creative's Vista sound drivers still aren't feature complete for all of their cards yet. They're closer, but they aren't there yet.

For those of us who do gaming, Windows x64 is still very much new ground.

Here's an example...and while it's a server issue it makes the case about the type of things you need to be aware of in the differences between Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. We recently upgraded a Windows Server 2003 SP1/SQL2000 SP4 32-bit based cluster to a Windows Server 2003 R2/SQL 2005 SP2 64-bit based cluster. One of the supporting applications requires Oracle OLE/ODBC drivers to pull data from another Oracle database. It took us a week of research and trying different configurations to finally get that one piece of the puzzle to work. While a week may not sound like a lot initially, when you start to consider that this is for a world-wide system and updates to the data aren't happening...well, I think you get the picture.

Now scale that down and equate it to a hardcore gamer not being able to play some of their games just because they made the decision to go 64-bit without researching it.

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Hey Guys, like I said before, I have NEVER overclocked in my entire life. Even the procesor I have now has never been overclocked. I just had two quick question, I have read that you can overclock the E6850 to 4Ghz on Air Cooling, is this correct? And second The Q6600, I am guessing that you need Water Cooling right? And if this is true, then I am not going to overclock this processor. I have never done water cooling either.

One day has passed by and I thought I was sure that I want the Q6600, but now I Am starting to have second thoughts again. If I don't get the Quad-Core now, I will get to for sure when the 45nm comes out. I know alot of you guys said that The Q6600 is the best way to go. Maybe I will give it one more day and then I will make my Final Final Decusion!

brucevangeorge to answer your question, I like to get as many answers I can from everyside. I hope you don't mind.

THX!

P.S. Fusion

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Hey Guys, like I said before, I have NEVER overclocked in my entire life. Even the procesor I have now has never been overclocked. I just had two quick question, I have read that you can overclock the E6850 to 4Ghz on Air Cooling, is this correct? And second The Q6600, I am guessing that you need Water Cooling right? And if this is true, then I am not going to overclock this processor. I have never done water cooling either.

One day has passed by and I thought I was sure that I want the Q6600, but now I Am starting to have second thoughts again. If I don't get the Quad-Core now, I will get to for sure when the 45nm comes out. I know alot of you guys said that The Q6600 is the best way to go. Maybe I will give it one more day and then I will make my Final Final Decusion!

brucevangeorge to answer your question, I like to get as many answers I can from everyside. I hope you don't mind.

THX!

P.S. Fusion

In that case, I'd go to CompUSA and get their Acer Q6600 machine (2GB, 500GB, ATI 1650SE) for $750 or so.

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