E6850 VS Q6600

nitro666

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I know that there have been many debates on this topic and I have already made my decision which CPU to choose and I know many might not agree :) The reason for this thread is to share why I have decided on a E6850 and not Q6600.

I have been spending quite some time on this in the past couple of days and I have decided on the E6850 because I figured that I will not make much use of the two additional cores at this point in time. However additional clock speed will be very useful and will always be! Yes I could OC the Q6600 to 3.0GHz but I prefer to OC the E6850 to 3.6GHz without much effort.

I use my PC mainly for Photoshop and Web Development. Personally I don't run many applications at the same time, yes I might have Illustrator and a number of other applications open while I use Photoshop but only one of these applications will be doing something. Yes I might have outlook checking my mail, winamp playing a song and FF loading web sites while I use one application but dual core is more than enough for that. Multiple cores are mainly useful when running multiple applications/requests at the same time such as a server would and since I don't do much of that a dual core is more than enough.

Support for multiple cores within an application is very very limited because it depends on the type of application; only those applications which breaks a task into multiple tasks can be designed to handle multiple cores such as 3dsMAX which for instance during rendering would assign say one core for lighting and another for geometry calculations, etc... This also applies for games, in the future games will make better use of multiple cores but personally I don't play games on my PC as I use it only for my work.

So there you go a dual core with higher clock speeds can bring way more benefits than a quad core with less clock speeds so if you come across this decision you really need to ask yourself what will benefit the most for your everyday computer tasks... I know quad core sounds cool and the idea of having 4 cores is amazing but what's the point in having these when you will barely use them? On the other hand you will definitely make use of additional clock speed...
 

nightscope

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Actually a Q6600 GO revision can go up to 3.6 Ghz pretty easily as well...if you know what you're doing.

As quad cores get more abundant, so will the applications that will fully utilize them. In my opinion it's best to either buy a quad core now, or a cheap C2D, overclock it, and wait till some more quads come out.
 

rayzor

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if you're going to use your pc for office stuff only, you shouldn't even go with the E6850. Go with a lower-clocked model and save yourself some $$. If you do plan on doing engineering type work, then I'd go for the Q6600 just in case. Also, vista runs like a dream on quads since it's multi-threaded, so that is another consideration.
 

nitro666

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I am not much into overclocking as a matter of fact this will be my first OC but according to what I read on this site, 3.3GHz is the limit on the Q6600 (3.0Ghz being the safest) anything more than that will just decrease the life of the CPU unless you invest in liquid cooling and I am definitely not going to bother with that. I am going to OC the E6850 using a Zalman CNPS9500-AT CPU Cooler which should make it relatively safe for 3.6GHz.

Regarding applications fully utilizing multiple cores; only applications that can break a task into multiple tasks can handle multiple cores (i.e. multi-threaded apps) otherwise regardless how many cores you will have single-threaded applications simply can't make use of multi-cores at least not in the near future.

Thing is today the E6850 is very cheap unlike the QX6850 and the 45nm is around the corner so a cheap dual with the highest available clockspeed for my use is best until I upgrade to the 45nm in approx a year time.
 

nitro666

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There is almost no difference in price between the E6700 and E6850 at least in Europe (www.overclockers.co.uk). As for Vista, it is still too early to upgrade, at least not until SP1 is out. Vista is new and inevitably unstable and the last thing I want as a developer is waste time with incompatibility, security paranoia and bugs that it might have :)
 

warezme

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Well I can assure your 3.3Ghz is not the limit of a Q6600 unless you stick with the factory cooler. Then I wouldn't recommend you try to OC at all.

A good air cooler will take the Q6600 to 3.4 and 3.5 without excessive voltage and therefore heat. H2O cooling will take it to 3.6 to 3.7Ghz but there in my opinion you start to hit thermal limits even of the G0 stepping.

But you are right in that the E6850 will OC higher with cheaper cooling and why wouldn't it? It has HALF as many cores to push current through??? It always surprises me how folks don't logically figure that out.
 

nitro666

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Well this article http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/08/dual_vs_quad/page17.html suggests that 3.3GHz is the "safe" limit for the Q6600 using a cheap cooler. I am sure you can OC the Q6600 to higher clockspeeds with a better cooling system but as you know same applies to the E6850. Bottom line the E6850 will always OC higher than the Q6600 in terms of moderate overclocking and this thread is all about dual core with high clockspeed vs quad core with low clockspeed for users using mainly single-threaded applications.