Quad-Core cpu's for a home user... needless?

[Linktothepast]

I am currently thinking of buying a new system, going from a single core Athlon64 to a newer processor. The obvious dilemma is going quad-core or dual core. So lets see:
a)Quad core have up to double the price of a similar clocked dual core cpu.
b)Quad core have two times the watt consumption of a dual core cpu. Meaning double working costs . If the cpu is overclocked we talk about 100 watts difference per hour only. Considering that a lot of people leave the pc open at nights in order to download stuff from the net, that kind of difference means a lot of money spend meaningless really, added to the increased purchase cost. Sure there is coul n' quiet and other stuff that can help, but still the difference will be double considering a dual core.
c)Quad core have double the processing power. But for what really? The only applications currently for a home user (and probably also in the future) that can benefit a lot are video editing applications. So if you are not a video editing maniac, making divx, H264 mp4 movies the added power is useless. Video games, emulation, internet, office applications do not benefit or are already fast for a home user.
d)Quad core have less overclocking capabilities ,meaning less performance with single threaded applications, like emulation let's say?

Funny think is that the companies are thinking of eight cores already. Now is that useless or what? Maybe the paradise for professional work (servers, researchers), but for home users? I really hope that they think of something better because the core think is starting to become ridiculous.

[RPGW1ZaRD]

Nah dual is just fine for a home user. But the quicker ppl move to quads the sooner the support will come. I also had the choise of picking a quite cheap Q6600 now due to the huge price cuts and all but went for E6750 which was a lot cheaper and can be overclocked to 3.5GHz+. Damn it's fast and I thought I had a fast CPU when I had a dual core Opteron 165 @ 2.8GHz.

[Coolsvilleman]

I went for the Q6600 personally. Longer term benefits I think and I got a really good deal on it. Totally fast and I can overclock it later if I want. Most likely to 3.0GHz.

[StriderVM]

It kinda depends on how you use your computer really....

If most of what you do is play games and games and.... Type something.... I don't think going Quad Core is worth it....

If you say, convert a movie, while burning a recently converted movie, then playing a game.... Then maybe.....

[Linktothepast]

Originally Posted by StriderVM

If most of what you do is play games and games and.... Type something.... I don't think going Quad Core is worth it....

If you say, convert a movie, while burning a recently converted movie, then playing a game.... Then maybe.....

Well something like that i think it would be hard disk drive limited. Bring multi-disks to people i say

[sims]

Buying something for future proofing is nonsense, especially with cpu's. People bought pentium d's for its promise of dual core support. Now tell me who's going crazy enough to use a pentium d on pcsx2, I'll laugh at them.

By the time the feature( quad core, 64bit) has a purpose, you'll have to buy something current to take advantage of such features anyway.

[RPGW1ZaRD]

Yea they're clearly ahead of their time like octa+ cores Nehalem is going to be already in next year. I always found it better to stay away from the extra core geared CPUs when they've just been launched as usually a lot more optimized and tweaked ones appear later on and will be so much cheaper now when twice the amount cores is even available and since it takes for a while for programs to to start supporting the more cores, I always thought it's best to change to a dual when quads start appearing and then change to quad when octa cores start appearing etc. That's what I'm doing at least, I'm NOT falling for the crap "more is better than less" as that doesn't apply more than in a rare cases. And I'm not the type of guy that is doing multiple things at same time with my computer, guess I'm the old fashioned guy that prefers doing one thing at a time. lol

But if I was to upgrade now and plan to use the cpu for like 3 years I'd clearly pick a Kentsfield now but I do a lot more frequent updates personally. Just picked up this E6750 but planning to swap it out for a Yorkfield 45nm quad later on when I can get at least an 8.5x multi (yes these chips seems to be using half multis) for like 150 - 170€ / 170 - $200 or perhaps sometimes in Q2-Q3 timeframe in 2008 but that depends a lot how it looks like then, if no quad core supporting games out or in near future, no upgrade, easy as that.

[tuanming]

Octo core. I'd get octo core when it's fabricated in 32nm

[skoreanime]

Gotta agree with RPG there. I upgraded to a dual-core (current rig) once the Kentsfield started rolling out. I'll grab a quad-core once the octo-cores start coming out .

[El_Diablos]

I am in doubt

Originally Posted by RPGW1ZaRD

But if I was to upgrade now and plan to use the cpu for like 3 years I'd clearly pick a Kentsfield now

That is my case! Kentsfield is a kernel of Q6600 ?
I am going to play PCSX2 and I LIKE VIDEO EDITING! So what to do - buy E6750 or Q6600...

But u're saying that modern Quad Cores is not optimized etc. and better wait for their new revisions. Right now i cant wait anymore
Next salary is coming in 15 days so please help me with choice!

[ian209]

i wouldn't say a quadcore is needless, but I doubt you will take full advantage of it often. It's not everyday that you need to convert vid, songs, play games, encode videos, calculate pi, and run PCSX2 at the same time... :/

[ChankastRules]

I'd go for the core2, quad one is not needed right now.

[james.miller]

depends really. only if you like the bit of encoding or doing thousands of things at once are they really worth it.


i'll be picking up a q6600 as soon as the 95w versions are available here. i appreciate the encoding times, being about to encoding media in real time for streaming to my ps3 downstairs, being able to play a game and have other cores working on something else at the same time. for me personally its worth it.

[Leiw]

dual core is the way to go for now

also when buying a quad, and running 4 applications/games at once you are likely to be limited by your HDD doing 4 things at once which could probably slow down everything and your RAM will fill up quickly

It is just marketing... you don't need a quad core

[james.miller]

are you speaking from experience or assumption?


i dont know any games that require a sustained 60mb/sec + from the hard drive and even if there were such a game, chances are material you're encoding would be on a different drive on a different channel. as for ram, well, you buy a quad core, its not likely your going to have 512mb of ram really.

[RPGW1ZaRD]

Like james.miller pointed out, it heavily depends on how you will be using it if it's worth it or not, some finds an use of the extra cores a lot earlier than others. I never do any encoding or very rare and I don't multitask so therefore a quad hasn't got any use for me yet as the only benefit that would have any bigger matter to me would be when PC games are utilizing quads but that's not really the case yet. Also if there would be changes in architecture so they would have an IPC advantage in single/duo threaded apps then that would be another matter but since Kentsfield (Core 2 Quad) doesn't have any advantage over Conroe (Core 2 Duo) in single/duo threaded apps it's only a waste of money to me (not to meantion power consumption and heat dissipation increase).

And yea I'm pretty sure most quad core owners are either running 2GB or 4GB RAM.

But I still claim to my earlier post that for the average home user quads aren't needed yet.

[ian209]

Originally Posted by james.miller

are you speaking from experience or assumption?


i dont know any games that require a sustained 60mb/sec + from the hard drive and even if there were such a game, chances are material you're encoding would be on a different drive on a different channel. as for ram, well, you buy a quad core, its not likely your going to have 512mb of ram really.

well depends too. If you don't have enough ram, your pagefile will make up for it, and thus require a faster HDD. But as you said, if ure getting a quad, u might as well get some decent amount of ram, else it would be useless.

[FLaRe85]

I'm seeing some misinformation here. Applications do not have to be written to support a specific number of cores. They just have to utilize efficient threading and SMP will take care of the rest, distributing the threads out to the various cores. If an application is written to support dual core, it likely will perform even better on a quad core cpu.

Granted, some lazy developers may be simply splitting existing processes into two threads, but that's still beneficial as that would leave 2 free cores for some other applications or the OS to utilize.

[Linktothepast]

Generally i believe that it is not just the matter of supporting the four cores, is the matter of weather an application can support so many threads. So don't expect the loop in performance will be as much as from single to dual core, and even less from four to eight.
Maybe AMD's decision to include the gpu instead of more cores will prove wise in the long run. Time will tell.

[firyace]

There are alot of software that supported quad cores, its just that those software are often linux/unix based and are usually not used by personal users.

I myself am working with a 3D modelling software in which we need 8-cores and 16 gig of ram to run at the workplace. Other software that I can think of deals with massive data processing and analyzing that specializes within a given field which is most likely developed by research groups to aid themselves in research.

However, given that amount of cores, it also needs alot of memory too, and right now the maximum is probably 8gigs for personal computers, which is clearly not enough.