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...
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...