Bottlenecked Q66000 Is this real?

[tato999]

I read this review on newegg and I was wondering if this is true?. I mean how much difference is it going to be in perfomance. It really worth buy the Q6600 instead of the E6600 please any help or suggestion would be apreciate.


Pros: quad core, better for multitasking

Cons: horrible performance gain over the E6600, bottle neck of cpu bandwidth, bad planning, not worth the $

Other Thoughts: Intel caused a bottle neck with this when they doubled the cores and didnt bump up the bus speed. E6600 gives 533Mhz per core, the Q6600 only gives 266Mhz or 333Mhz depending on if you are runnign a 1066Mhz FSB or 1333Mhz FSB. The gain from this is definately not worth the cost even after the price drop will happen. Definately dont get this. Wait for the true quads or get the E6600

 

[Hatman]

While the cores are nto as efficiently connected as the cores on the core2duo series, actually they are basicly 2 core2duo's on the same die, they are still pretty good.

 

[Valdis]

Wait for the true quads or get the E6600

yes buy dual or wait for something from amd. the quad cores dont have much use now for average joe

 

[turpit]

I read this review on newegg and I was wondering if this is true?. I mean how much difference is it going to be in perfomance. It really worth buy the Q6600 instead of the E6600 please any help or suggestion would be apreciate.


Pros: quad core, better for multitasking

Cons: horrible performance gain over the E6600, bottle neck of cpu bandwidth, bad planning, not worth the $

Other Thoughts: Intel caused a bottle neck with this when they doubled the cores and didnt bump up the bus speed. E6600 gives 533Mhz per core, the Q6600 only gives 266Mhz or 333Mhz depending on if you are runnign a 1066Mhz FSB or 1333Mhz FSB. The gain from this is definately not worth the cost even after the price drop will happen. Definately dont get this. Wait for the true quads or get the E6600

[[edit to correct error as noted by Heyyou27]]

Not likely. FSB saturation has not been a significant problem with the C2D's or C2Q's. FSB saturation was more of an AMD fanboy 'warcry' in their attempts to discredit the MCM.

Regardless, if you note , the review says "horrible performance gain over the E6600, bottle neck of cpu bandwidth, bad planning, not worth the $"

The Q6600 runs at the same 2.4GHz as the E6600. In a single or 2 threaded app, for identical clocked cores, you will see little to no gain with a quad core CPU. In fact regardless of whether a CPU is 'native' like AMDs proposed CPUs, or MCM such as Intels current CPUs you will see little to no improvement going from dual to quad core unless the software you are running is written to make use of all 4 cores. There are relatively few programs that do this right now.

So most likely, the person who wrote that review was some 'kiddie' who's been reading forums clogged with "quad core r0x0rs" crap, bought off on it and the fallacy that more is always better, but didnt understand that to see a substantial benefit from quad core, the software you are using actaully has to be written to make use of more than 2 cores.

 

[Heyyou27]

I think you mean the Q6600 runs at 2.4GHz.

The FSB bottleneck is a load of BS spewed by AMD fanboys to try and act like there's a reason to not buy Intel's superior product. Because each core is able to communicate with the other core on it's die, a lot less traffic goes through the FSB.

 

[djgandy]

I read this review on newegg and I was wondering if this is true?. I mean how much difference is it going to be in perfomance. It really worth buy the Q6600 instead of the E6600 please any help or suggestion would be apreciate.


Pros: quad core, better for multitasking

Cons: horrible performance gain over the E6600, bottle neck of cpu bandwidth, bad planning, not worth the $

Other Thoughts: Intel caused a bottle neck with this when they doubled the cores and didnt bump up the bus speed. E6600 gives 533Mhz per core, the Q6600 only gives 266Mhz or 333Mhz depending on if you are runnign a 1066Mhz FSB or 1333Mhz FSB. The gain from this is definately not worth the cost even after the price drop will happen. Definately dont get this. Wait for the true quads or get the E6600

The explaination here is simple. The person that wrote this doesn't know what he is talking about.
The Q6600 will kill the E6600 in applications that can take advantage of its extra cores.
It also runs at the same speed as the E6600 anyway so in single threaded applications it will perform almost the same.

If you are a heavy multi tasker buy the Quad.
If you play a lot of new games I'd recommend buying the quad.
If you use applications that can take advantage of more than 2 cores buy the quad.
If you are willing the pay the extra for the quad get it.

@Valdis: Are you saying Quad core has no use now but when AMD release it it will?

@tato: Do you even know what true quad means. People throw the term around like it's going to make single core apps 4x faster. I feel sorry for those guys, they're in for a shock

@HatMan: Can't disagree.


I'll pick some benchmarks where the quad shows its stuff.
You should look through though, if all you do is play games you might want to invest more in a graphics card rather than a cpu.

80% improvement in 3dmax
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=695&model2=432&chart=188

70% improvement in x264 encoding
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=695&model2=432&chart=182

75% improvement in Adobe Premier Pro
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=695&model2=432&chart=185

57% improvement in windows media encoding
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=695&model2=432&chart=183

And to nitpick holes in AMD's native arch...Look at the FX-72 4x4 results against a single FX-62. AMD scales worse with more cores. Does 4x4 use HT links, and if so why does it scale worse than Intels FSB. Consdering Intel's FSB is "bandwidth bottlenecked" as a lot of people claim.
Would a single FX-72 be quite a bit faster than a FX-62? Even if that's the case I don't think the AMD platform would scale any better than Intels.

 

[turpit]

I think you mean the Q6600 runs at 2.4GHz.

The FSB bottleneck is a load of BS spewed by AMD fanboys to try and act like there's a reason to not buy Intel's superior product. Because each core is able to communicate with the other core on it's die, a lot less traffic goes through the FSB.

Yup, Good catch...thanks very much

+5 observation points to Heyyou27

 

[graysky]

Whoever wrote that has sh*t for brains as do most of people who author user reviews on newegg. Remember, anyone can write anything on the Internet and sell it as fact or half-ass researched opinion; it's not like a scientific journal where every article gets peer-reviewed and has to be formally accepted to get published. Here are data that shows about a 1.8x gain of a Q6600 vs. an E6600 doing the same x264 encode.

In theory, the Q6600 should be 2.0x faster. I suspect the difference is in the multipass nature of the test (the first pass never maxs out the cores), and the overhead associated with managing 4 cores vs. 2 cores. Point is, it's nearly twice the speed in this test.

 

[Mondoman]

...
@Valdis: Are you saying Quad core has no use now but when AMD release it it will? ...

No, I think he's saying that quad core doesn't have much additional value over dual-core for most users now. Thus, either buy a Core2Duo, or wait to see if AMD introduces something more attractive.

 

[Wombat2]

There are certain applications for which having two dual cores pasted together is a problem e.g. the scientific apps I use.

However, even in this worst case scenario you still get to effectively utilise 3 of the 4 cores. 3/4 is as bad as it gets.

Of course, to even ask this question your apps of interest must support 4+ cores in the first place. Microsoft Word isnt going to be 4X faster on a quad core.

 

[djgandy]

There are certain applications for which having two dual cores pasted together is a problem e.g. the scientific apps I use.

However, even in this worst case scenario you still get to effectively utilise 3 of the 4 cores. 3/4 is as bad as it gets.

Of course, to even ask this question your apps of interest must support 4+ cores in the first place. Microsoft Word isnt going to be 4X faster on a quad core.

If each thread is assigned a core this shouldn't be a problem. If context switching causes a thread to hop from say core 1 to core 3 then the glued design will have to request data from memory rather than L2/L3 cache.
This is something O/S could program around.

 

[TechnologyCoordinator]

I had problems in XP with a thread hopping cores. I just set the core affinity and presto, performance improved. PS - I have AMD, not Intel.

 

[djgandy]

I had problems in XP with a thread hopping cores. I just set the core affinity and presto, performance improved. PS - I have AMD, not Intel.

Yeah that's exactly what I am talking about. For seperate processes its fine to do it through task manager. Programmers will have to integrate it for threads I think though with SetThreadAffinityMask (don't quote me on this). It's very simple to do and if a process will benefit from it the chances are the user would want it.

 

[tato999]

what is the affinity?

What is that please tell me because im going to buy a Q6600 and i dont know what are you talking about

 

[djgandy]

affinity is the processing core that the process (program) is assigned to.

Ctrl + Alt + Del and look in the Processes tab of task manager.
Right click a process and you should see set affinity.

 

[Heyyou27]

what is the affinity?

What is that please tell me because im going to buy a Q6600 and i dont know what are you talking about

In task manager you can set any running program to run only on a certain core.

 

[graysky]

Yeah, what he said. Here's a screenshot:

To me, there's no reason to mess with affinity for most programs; just let the XP kernel do what it wants. There are also command-line utils that will permanently set the affinity by modifying the target .exe you select. I can't remember the name of the one I messed around with... something like imagechk or chkimage or ...?

..again, I didn't see a reason to do this manually.


EDIT: looks like heyyou just beat me to the punch

 

[tato999]

Ok thank you very much for your help.

Every day you learn something new right?

Nice to know that

 

[Zorg]

Ok thank you very much for your help.

Every day you learn something new right?

Nice to know that

Now run out and get your Q6600 @ $266 and match that with a P35. And then enjoy.

 

[tato999]

Correct if Im wrong but What i Understand is?

Poe example

If you want to run the antivirus you can set to execute on the cpu1

And them if you want to paly games you can set the game to run on the cpu2 and if you them want to do something else yo can set to run on the cpu 3
Is that right?

 

[Zorg]

Correct if Im wrong but What i Understand is?

Poe example

If you want to run the antivirus you can set to execute on the cpu1

And them if you want to paly games you can set the game to run on the cpu2 and if you them want to do something else yo can set to run on the cpu 3
Is that right?

No. Let XP do the core allocation for you. If you have a problem with a particular program not performing properly, then and only then, lock it to one core to see if that helps.

 

[jackluo923]

Why match it with P35 when you can match it with P965. If you don't plan to upgrade after you buy the Q6600 for 1 year, then there's no point wasting money on P35 chipset. When you're overclock a Q6600, you'll rarely go beyond 450mhz FSB which a P965chipset can do easily without any voltage bump.

 

[Hatman]

I wonder if vista takes advantage of the cores and allocates them better than XP?

Would be interesting if the new software on it actually did. Yet another reason to go 64BIT Vista!!!