Is the (raw performance) of Core2 Duo/Quad still viable?

[dave_the_nerd]

There's a solution to that: Don't install Flash Player.

Edit: More seriously, I'm sorry that Core2's not cutting it for you for web browsing. I do find that having Flash Player installed, though, when sites play videos for ads and stuff, it REALLY bogs things down. I've found that since I've not installed it, ads aren't nearly as draining on the system resources, when they are rendered by Waterfox's HTML5 media support.

YMMV, if you can get along without it. But if it's just the Flash ads dragging your experience down, try un-installing it.

I'm "suffering" through browsing with a Celeron J1900, a quad-core Bay Trail Atom, at around 2.4Ghz turbo ("burst") speed. It's not horrible, but it's noticeably slower than a "big-core", and for whatever reason, this forum software is SO bloated, that I have to wait, pause, wait for my text to appear when I'm typing. Which makes fixing typos a PITA. I don't remember this being a problem since getting modems faster than 2400baud.

That has nothing to do with connection speed. It's all running on your local system. I'd assume Javascript, but the web inspector says there's php elements.

I ain't no web dev. Either way, whatever scripting language it uses for the fancy formatting buttons is choking your J1900. Not unheard of - even us "big core master race" types have issues with javascript.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was referring to the experience of using a BBS using a 2400baud or slower modem, with remote echo / no local echo.
You could type quickly, and the letters wouldn't show up for a split second.

Interestingly, I'm not having that same problem on my Lenovo A8-6310 laptop (Beema quad-core 1.8Ghz).

Text comes out pretty-much instantly. I wonder if there's something wonky about the USB3.0 drivers on the J1900 Brix box.

I'm on Waterfox 49.0.1 on the Lenovo, and Waterfox 49.0.3 on the J1900.

And now that I'm using the "Edit Post" box, that pops up over the page, rather than the quick reply box on the page, there's some lag. Still not as bad as on the J1900 though, for some reason.

 

[Torn Mind]

There are ads at the top and bottom, the members online now, new posts, and the arrow that can take you all the way to the top or bottom of the page. The new skins are script heavy and will bring weaker CPUs to their knees. You might need to go to the vBulletin wannabe skin.

It's nothing for my faux i3, which is an i7-3770K with two cores disabled, Hyperthreading enabled, and Speedstep disabled, and I have at least 140 Chrome tabs open and a HDD. The final frontier for me is my disabling all but one core and disabling Hyperthreading on this i7 and feeling what happens.

 

[Valantar]

Actually for fun earlier this year I kinda made a Core2 gaming machine for a friend out of junk I had laying around.

I took a Q9550 and OCed it to its max (3.8ghz). I added in 8GB of ram (4 slot mobo), gave it a Sata 2 SSD, and my 1GB 7850.

Overall it does an ok job gaming, as it can play most 2011-2013 games with lower settings. The real limit is on some games it has problems getting to 60fps, but if you play 30 fps console-style it works fine.

Actually overall it plays Rocket League better than my G3258 rig ever did.

Considering my experiences with my Q9450 (3,5GHz OC) and Fury X, I'd say you're GPU limited across the board. I have no trouble playing even brand new titles at 1440p (not everything at Ultra settings, but at the very least high).

 

[bononos]

The slower mobile C2D's are still usable but are getting long in the tooth by now. Even with an ssd, browsing isn't snappy.

 

[jihe]

The slower mobile C2D's are still usable but are getting long in the tooth by now. Even with an ssd, browsing isn't snappy.

Still snappy if you install adblock and nosctipts

 

[CropDuster]

How about the mobile chips? My wife has an old Celeron 900 in her laptop from college that she'd like to use for lesson plans and such. Is throwing a 45nm C2D (or maybe a mobile Quad if the chipset supports it) into it for ~$40 worth the trouble?

 

[cbn]

How about the mobile chips? My wife has an old Celeron 900 in her laptop from college that she'd like to use for lesson plans and such. Is throwing a 45nm C2D (or maybe a mobile Quad if the chipset supports it) into it for ~$40 worth the trouble?

P8700 (2.53 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $4 shipped on ebay.

P8800 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $10 shipped on ebay.

P9600 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $17 shipped on ebay.

P9700 (2.8 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $24 shipped on ebay

So.....those are all good upgrades relative to the existing Celeron 900 (which is 35W 2.2 Ghz 1C with 1MB cache).

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

C2Q IPC is ~= Phenom II, which is still perfectly serviceable provided the clocks are high enough.
Heck, FX IPC is worse!

 

[Valantar]

P8700 (2.53 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $4 shipped on ebay.

P8800 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $10 shipped on ebay.

P9600 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $17 shipped on ebay.

P9700 (2.8 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $24 shipped on ebay

So.....those are all good upgrades relative to the existing Celeron 900 (which is 35W 2.2 Ghz 1C with 1MB cache).

Just for fun, I stuck a C2D T9300 (2,5GHz 6MB L2, 35W) into my girlfriend's old (no longer used) eMachines laptop that originally housed a Celeron T3300 (2GHz dual core 1MB L2, 35W). Runs hotter than before, but performance increased dramatically.

I don't actually know if this is a concern, but the Celeron 900 (like my T3300) runs on an 800Mz FSB. The P series listed above are all 1066MHz FSB parts. I guess it depends on the laptop/motherboard/BIOS whether different FSB speeds are supported. I wouldn't take it for granted in a laptop, at least. I ended up going for the fastest 800MHz FSB part I could find, as I didn't want to spend $20 on a dud.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

my htpc, originally build in '08 and with various upgrades since, is an e7400, intel g35 mobo, 4 gb ram, kingston 256 gb ssd (nas for media storage) and hd7750 video. is used for casual browsing, some old games, steam streaming, youtube, and occasion real time transcoding of live/recorded tv to phones/tablets (only one stream at a time however). and kodi/plex of course. runs fine for what it does.

if it were suddenly my only pc i could easily survive with it.

only reason i will rebuild it soonish is the hardware is pretty old and i worry about its reliability. figure it cant last forever.. can it?

at work we just retired some pcs that were e8400's. only reason they were replaced is that they were vista and they needed to goto 7 for the new software we run.

 

[AtenRa]

Ok, I have received the Lenovo M58 USFF refurbished System with Core 2 E7400 (2.93GHz) + 2GB DDR-3 SO-DIMM and Win7 Pro. I have installed one more SO-DIMM with 1GB but I also have a spare 2GB SO-DIMM for a 4GB total system RAM. I will also have to install an SSD because the system comes with a 160GB HDD WD160AAJS Blue SATA drive.
Brick PSU with 19,5V - 6,7A for 130W total

For now, I just installed Win 10 Pro and activated using the Win 7 key on the USFF case, updated Windows 10 and it has installed drivers for every major device (iGPU, Lan etc).

System power on the wall.

Win 10 Pro 64bit desktop idle = 30-31W
1080p youtube playback (Star Wars Rogue One trailer #2) = 43W to 53W with a once time spike to 58W
Cinebench R15 64bit ST = 50-51W
Cinebench R15 64bit MT = 59-60W

System really needs an SSD, the CPU is more than enough for every day use (Internet, video/music playback, Office work etc), the only device that drags the system down is the HDD.

For that price this system with an added cost of an SSD, is more than fine even today for a lot of people. And it comes in a USFF case with official Win 7 /Win 10 and also 2 Years guaranty to make it even more appealing. Also i believe the mobo can support Core 2 Quads, ill check it out and tell you later.
The only problem is the lack of dGPU support, i dont believe i can install even a Low Profile card in this chassis.

 

[coffeemonster]

C2Q IPC is ~= Phenom II, which is still perfectly serviceable provided the clocks are high enough.
Heck, FX IPC is worse!

true but not by much, and FX clocks considerably higher which more than makes up the difference if you were comparing them realistically.

 

[VirtualLarry]

For that price this system with an added cost of an SSD, is more than fine even today for a lot of people. And it comes in a USFF case with official Win 7 /Win 10 and also 2 Years guaranty to make it even more appealing. Also i believe the mobo can support Core 2 Quads, ill check it out and tell you later.
The only problem is the lack of dGPU support, i dont believe i can install even a Low Profile card in this chassis.

I gotta tell you, that lack of dGPU expandability is a real deal-killer, for me personally, if I were to invest in Core2-era rigs.

The chipset IGPs of that era were SO bad, that I consider a dGPU a necessity.

Even for Sandy Bridge-era rigs, I put in a dGPU. The iGPU is still not good enough for me.

Ivy Bridge, it's kind of a toss-up, and with Haswell, finally, the iGPU is good enough for desktop and some media-playback work. Skylake is a dream as far as the iGPU goes. With the i3-6100, you can even play Skyrim at 1080P low!

 

[Markfw]

Larry, if you saw my thread in DC, my E8400 could NOT feed a GTX1070 doing F@H. I upgraded to a X3360 Xeon, and it could keep up, but the mobo and PCI-e 1.0 slot kept the card from delivering the full potential. It took an AMD 860k and a current PCI-e 3.0 motherboard to get the max from the card. I am sure there were other options that would have worked, but the motherboard was only $42, and the CPU was $70. Good enough.

Edit: To clarify, before I get yelled at, the "could not feed" meant cpu was at 100% in both cores, and performance was well under what was expected. The X3360 helped, but not much. The 860k and new motherboard was the cure, possibly just the PCI-e 1.0 slot going to 3.0 was the problem, but regardless, the E8400 could not keep up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I believe it. That's one reason that I commented that nobody is still doing HPC (high performance computing) on Core2 rigs. The FSB setup, and out-dated chipsets, just don't hack it anymore for that purpose.

This thread was more centered around more "ordinary" usage, web browsing, office stuff, some gaming. (Although, gaming on Core2-era rigs suffers the same way that high-end GPU compute does.)

So let's chalk up a "FAIL" for Core2-era rigs, in the Distributed Computing category.

 

[cbn]

Some results I got with my Q6700 and WIndows 10:

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...smart-or-foolish.2437926/page-4#post-38398141

For example, In the past I noticed my Q6700 scrolls webpages smoother than my E6550 when both are using the GMA 3100 iGPU. Not sure if it is because of the extra single thread of the Q6700 or more likely because the Q6700 also has two more CPU cores for handing video happening on the extra webpages that I have open while I am simultaneously browsing (scrolling) another page? (GMA 3100 does not have any video decode on it).

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...smart-or-foolish.2437926/page-4#post-38400440

I took the video card out of my Q6700 4GB desktop and running Windows 10 on just the GMA 3100 iGPU the following you tube video @ 1080p did pretty well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v2L2UGZJAM

(Some parts were not perfectly smooth, but certainly very watchable)

Also, I notice when scrolling webages with firefox in Windows 10 I am getting fairly even activity spread across all four CPU cores (measured by MSI Afterburner).

EDIT: Not sure what happened with the video because in the past I recall a fast dual core being plenty for this. In any event, I thought the experience with the quad core was pretty good.

 

[Magic Carpet]

So, I was originally going to simply ask, "Is the Core2 (represented by an E8400, a $6 chip on ebay), still a viable CPU even today?".

Food for thought, Larry

 

[dave_the_nerd]

http://techreport.com/review/7927/the-pentium-m-on-the-desktop-dfi-855gme-mgf

*shrug*

 

[AtenRa]

I gotta tell you, that lack of dGPU expandability is a real deal-killer, for me personally, if I were to invest in Core2-era rigs.

The chipset IGPs of that era were SO bad, that I consider a dGPU a necessity.

Even for Sandy Bridge-era rigs, I put in a dGPU. The iGPU is still not good enough for me.

Ivy Bridge, it's kind of a toss-up, and with Haswell, finally, the iGPU is good enough for desktop and some media-playback work. Skylake is a dream as far as the iGPU goes. With the i3-6100, you can even play Skyrim at 1080P low!

Actually it does support a dGPU but only Low Profile Single Slot. Currently im searching for used LP SL cards, i have found 2-3 and waiting for the owners to respond

Cheapest i could find that also be able to play some older games at 720-900p are the GT 440, GT730 and GT740. I will update when/if have the card installed.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Heh, we have a couple old boxes here that are still running Win 95 and barring power outages have been on pretty much 24/7 for the better part of 15-20 years. Failures will continue to happen obviously, but a lot of old computers will continue to happily chug along for decades if you let them. When we moved labs this last year we ended up sending some old AT-style, 5 1/4 floppy towers that were hiding on a shelf to the recycle heap that still powered on.

I can imagine that. After just today completing all but the least essential tasks, I consider my Skylake Project to be "done." And I look at my accumulation of older hardware. I remember a song or album by a band entitled "The Last Waltz." This could be the last computer I build for a long time.

I have too many computers at the moment, and the assurance of a friend's enthusiasm to buy one of the them "lock-stock-and-barrel" seems to have fallen through temporarily because his wife complains about his own computer room. Inquiring of my dentist if he wanted it, he tells me he has some 12 OEM Dell systems in his garage: he replaces the units in his office, and the accumulation has built up over the years. Ultimately, as time passes, something useful moves in the direction of mere cyber-junk.

My mom's system -- she's 91 -- is the oldest in the house. It is a C2D Wolfdale reissued in 2010 under the model code once associated with Conroe: E6700. The motherboard was an $85 mATX Gigabyte board which now has a total of 4GB of RAM. I put it into a 1998 Gateway case. It has a $95 MX200 Crucial SSD of ~512GB. Dual-boot with the Win 10, but nobody here is all that eager to leave Win 7 -- including me.

I could reallocate the unit up for sale to moms and discard these old C2D parts. But what she has is totally adequate to her needs and use. I suppose, if my friend confirms the reversal in February, I can take my damn time. She's happy. Everybody's happy. Nobody complains. Except me --

I have too many computers.

 

[cbn]

Actually it does support a dGPU but only Low Profile Single Slot. Currently im searching for used LP SL cards, i have found 2-3 and waiting for the owners to respond

Cheapest i could find that also be able to play some older games at 720-900p are the GT 440, GT730 and GT740. I will update when/if have the card installed.

Interesting. It does have a slot on the back:

(But according to this, it is a low profile PCI slot)

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have too many computers at the moment, and the assurance of a friend's enthusiasm to buy one of the them "lock-stock-and-barrel" seems to have fallen through temporarily because his wife complains about his own computer room. Inquiring of my dentist if he wanted it, he tells me he has some 12 OEM Dell systems in his garage: he replaces the units in his office, and the accumulation has built up over the years. Ultimately, as time passes, something useful moves in the direction of mere cyber-junk.

My mom's system -- she's 91 -- is the oldest in the house. It is a C2D Wolfdale reissued in 2010 under the model code once associated with Conroe: E6700. The motherboard was an $85 mATX Gigabyte board which now has a total of 4GB of RAM. I put it into a 1998 Gateway case. It has a $95 MX200 Crucial SSD of ~512GB. Dual-boot with the Win 10, but nobody here is all that eager to leave Win 7 -- including me.

I could reallocate the unit up for sale to moms and discard these old C2D parts. But what she has is totally adequate to her needs and use. I suppose, if my friend confirms the reversal in February, I can take my damn time. She's happy. Everybody's happy. Nobody complains. Except me --

I have too many computers.

I HEAR ya, Bonzai!

My problem is not so much castoffs, but the fact that I've been building, and attempting to sell, batches of entry-level "Facebook boxes". Built as cheap as possible, some with Linux even, to cut costs. Cheapest is around $170.

And then there's my attempts at budget gaming rigs, with overclocked G3258 CPUs and Skylake G3900 CPUs.
And GTX950 2GB video cards. Cheapest with Windows 10, is around $450. (Those machines would make a damn fine Facebook boxes, too.)

I don't have that many "castoffs". I do have a pair of (now lightly OCed) Core2Quad Q9300 rigs, packed with 8GB DDR2-800, 160GB Intel SATA2 SSD (ebay, refurb/used), 500GB HDD, and a R7 260X video card.

I really wouldn't mind using the Core2Quad rigs, but my time is split between my J1900 Brix mini-PCs, and my OCed G4400 Skylake Pentium dual-core @ 4.45Ghz. The C2Q is faster than the J1900, but the OCed G4400 blows them both away.

 

[SandInMyShoes]

I don't actually know if this is a concern, but the Celeron 900 (like my T3300) runs on an 800Mz FSB. The P series listed above are all 1066MHz FSB parts. I guess it depends on the laptop/motherboard/BIOS whether different FSB speeds are supported. I wouldn't take it for granted in a laptop, at least. I ended up going for the fastest 800MHz FSB part I could find, as I didn't want to spend $20 on a dud.

Absolutely a concern. I just ran into this on a Compaq laptop with a Celeron 900mhz, which has an 800mhz FSB. It would not POST with a 1066mhz CPU, even with the latest BIOS.

 

[cbn]

With that concern mentioned above, I looked up the price on the T9300 ( (2.67 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) and it is $18 shipped on ebay.

P8700 (2.53 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $4 shipped on ebay.

P8800 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 3MB cache) is $10 shipped on ebay.

P9600 (2.67 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $17 shipped on ebay.

P9700 (2.8 Ghz 2C with 6MB cache) is $24 shipped on ebay

So.....those are all good upgrades relative to the existing Celeron 900 (which is 35W 2.2 Ghz 1C with 1MB cache).

So almost the same price as the 1066 FSB P9600 mentioned above.