Big dissapointment about QUAD CORE.

I work as Network Engineer for 15 years and I have not seen such dissapointment for years in perfomance of promising quad core. I bought great system with quad core, x8800 video card, scsi and etc and system suck. To be honest with you, quad core or dual core it is all bull **** and the same perfomance, slow downs, i see no difference between one cpu or quad in windows vista, same bottlenecks, freezing, multitasking is not working as it was promised to work in vista and in other enviroment. QUAD CORE is a big waste of money and SUCKSSSS.

The mere fact that you don't even know where a quad core would benefit you and where it would not, proves to me you did not need one in the first place. Which also means that for what you are using your PC you would have been better off with just a dual. Do more research before trashing something you don't understand.

I went from a dual core (E4300) OCed to 3.4GHz to a Quad core OCed to 3.8GHz and the quad core slaps the dual core around like a redheaded bastard step child in MULTITHREADED scientific computation which I use for my thesis and video encoding. Not to mention that I can be running computational codes in the background and continue to use the computer like nothing it going on. Hell I can even run my computational codes which take about 8 hour to complete, and play games at the same time, which means my computer is not completely down when running these codes for this extended period of time.

Have you ever heard of video editing? 3D rendering? Math/Scientific calculations? I just don't know what to tell you. What do you want that pc for if you don't know what to do with it? Web surfing? Knock yourself off!! Or go work in some networks instead...

Haven't you heard of BSD Unix or GNU/Linux ? Both of these OS's make extensive use of Dual & Quad-Core CPUs. As a Network engineer you should already know that.

In any case, if you do a lot of multitasking and run processor intensive applications (like VMWare) then you should see real performance gains with a Dual or Quad-Core CPU.

Woah, I went from a single core Athlon 3000+ to an OC'd Opteron Dual Core 165, and using XP it is SO MUCH BETTER I CAN'T BELIEVE IT.

I can do everything I want AT THE SAME TIME. I can burn movies WHILE PLAYING GAMES.

One thing I have to say, RESEARCH an OS before you purchase it. 1st rule of being a Network Engineer I am guessing. Sounds really rude but most people read reviews, and ask advice BEFORE purchasing quite possibly the WORST OS since ME.

The only people on Tom's that get it are people who are looking for new challenges/technologies, and KNOW that it is going to suck before they lay down the cash or get a copy to test/review.

IF you don't agree, send your computer to one of us on Tom's, we'll relive you of your burden and find your wayward PC a good home

Would you mind telling us what you do on your pc? Most people here will drool over those specs. I'm guessing that, like what others has said, Vista is causing the problems or maybe your pc is cluttered with crap. Or maybe even your pc is unstable. You didn't list your specs, so if you only have like 512mb of ram, of course your pc will suck As for my quad, I'm extremely satisfied with it, a huge improvement over my AMD Athlon XP 3000+.

I do not where you work at,man. but i can not believe you said that. Or, your system might be seriously screwed.

So you agree the OP's problem is Vista Zorg? Or you just pulling my chain?

i could sum up all i have to say in a few words: DELETED

i have built a couple quad core machines for friends however i do not own one myself... I have though, spent considerable amounts of time on a machine with the following specs:

evga 8800 ultra
Q6600 (tuniq tower + as5)
evga 680i mobo
2 gig corsair ram
720 (or 620 i cant remember) watt ocz psu

anyways this machine blows any single or dual core away... im running vista 32 bit ultimate, and its absolutely amazing. No slow downs at all, gobbles up every game. Virus scans take no time at all, converting video files takes a 3-8 minutes where as my p4 takes roughly 40 minutes. The overall stability of the machine is fantastic. I nor the owner of the pc has encountered a single lock up.. the cpu has never been near %100 capacity and so it is simple to multi task, watch a movie on one screen, type or surf the internet on the other.. Clearly you either have major problems with your pc or you dont own a quad core and are just bashing them because of ur noobishness...

how is this guy a network engineer? who actually believes him when he spews stupid sh1te like this? he doesn't know what to use his computer for, and he certainly doesn't seem to know how to run a quad core effectively. send that box to me and i'll make it scream like a little kid running away from michael jackson. i could seriously use that power for all the multi-tasking cpu-intensive stuff i do. you know, the usual: keeping 20 firefox tabs open, winamp, ventrilo, video games, using two to four copies of dvd-shrink at a time to compress dvd's from dual layer to single layer, ... average stuff.

Hard to say. The drivers keep improving and the fixes keep coming. It gets better by the month so if you were using it a number of months ago the situation has no doubt changed. It's not as mature as an OS that's been out there, what, like 7,8 years now? but it's got it's advantages too. New comparisons show the frame rate gap in games is just about closed. Look up the recent firing squad comparison.

It clearly depends a bit on what you do but for my uses it's 'there'. But hey, I like to live on the edge. Just don't be like my engineer friend who continued using 3.1 until he upgraded to XP.

i'm not entirely sure if you're not being sarcastic, falken699 :-P i'm gullible. but yeah, i used to be a big wow junkie >.< so i'd have that up on one 21" screen while doing all sorts of other stuff on the other 21". dvd's done ripping, pop em out, start a new one. run a virtual machine server / downloader (so my main system will never be affected by its activities.

i've been very happy with my dual core, and given that i'm now moving into 3ds max and other game production software for my degree program, i'm guessing i'll be seeing the value in the pleasures of quad or octo-core very soon myself.

I guess. I just have horrible Vista experience so far, and I'm likely not going to go Vista if Vista 64 fail me again. Might as well wait for the next iteration of Windows, which is due to come out in 2009.

@ zen LOL, love the link.

Didjya notice it is written by a guy named Rathbone??? LOL!!!

I hate Vista. Graphics are nice and polished, but other than that, I hate it. Bash bash bash.

as to limiting myself currently to 2 dvd's at once, that's only because i only have two dvd burners :-P but i did everything possible to rearrange my hard drives so as to leave the two onboard ide channels to the dvd burners.

so yeah, one burner to each port, but sadly, the bandwidth is still limiting me to perhaps 12x on one drive, and then 6-8x on the other, even though they no longer share a channel. i wonder if this is because of nvidia's implementation of an ide controller in the original nforce4 sli, or if it instead has to do with the nero burning api which dvd-shrink employs. i've had nero 6, 6.6, 7, and 8 installed at one point or another, and the problem crops up with each and any version, it seems. happens inside nero's own interface as well.

i don't know if my problem extends to alcohol 120%'s api or not, because i generally only use it to rip discs, rather than burn them.

I never said that Vista was his problem, I just said Vista bites. Partially in response to your comment, and partially because Vista bites.

ROFL... Just reading the post and the replies are hilarious!... I basically have to agree with everyone else.

In terms of Vista I think I'm one of the few people who actually like it. I think it really does take advantage of better performing systems especially in using multiple applications at once. I'll be the first to admit though that there are some major software issues especially for us who have HTPCs... but still wouldnt go back to XP and Vista is continuing to get better.

Amen! Let me just add that vista is getting better though. Just give it some time plus give microsoft time to generate about 96 more patches for it and it will run smooth as silk

You just need to wait for the software to catchup. However the rate of diminishing returns increasing the number of cores is faster than increasing clock speed.

Functional multi-threading in games will probably top out somewhere between 16 to 32 cores. Memory bandwidth should become a limitation about that time too. I don't see consumer apps ever being able to use 256 cores.

A quad core machine is very future proof and that's not a good thing(I really hope I'm wrong).

Though I will say pure number crunching that's not particularly memory intensive has a lot more headroom.

This is quite entertaining. Please continue.

Where's the end of the yellow cable ?

networks and computers in general have changed over the past 15 years.

If you hate it so much, then ill swap you your Quad Core for a Pentium 4 3.2ghz

That poor soul will never come to site again for help..... just imagine that little techno weenie reaching out his poorly writhering hand asking for help.... YOU BASTAGES GOOD JOB EVERYONE KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!...

I used to be a LAN Admin. And from that experience, I did have a network engineer department to help when they had PC problems. Seems as though, not all network engineers that I knew, didn't know how to turn a PC/Laptop on. Other then that, they all have a vast amount of understanding network protocols.