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quad cores vs 2 dual cores

S

sulanebouxi

Member
I'm trying to help a friend put a workstation together and I'm wondering, besides the price, is there any advantage in having a quad core over 2 dual cores or vice versa? I've been trying to decide whether or not 2 dual core 5140 xeons or 2 e6600's are somehow better at batch rendering than a single quad core q6600.

I'm leaning towards the quad core since they have 8mb of L2 cache. But, I hear there are some compatibility issues and cooling problems?

Thanks!
 
well if you have a quad instead of 2 duals you only need to cool 1 chip, which means a cooler system and better airflow, as well as each processor getting cooler air (as they will inevitably heat the air around them), and a quieter system. plus if you get a quad (assuming you have a mobo with 2 sockets that can support it), you can throw another quad in later for an 8 core setup.

a quad core is harder to cool than a dual core for obvious reasons, but if you don't overclock it "to the max" it won't be an issue. however, this little hindrance is nullified by the fact that you'd be running 2 dual cores instead of 1 (again, they'd be heating the case, disrupting airflow, etc).
 
The dual socket system will cost more and not be any faster. You can't use E6600s in SMP, you would have to go Xeon.

It technically probably a bit easier to cool the dual CPU system, as the heat isn't as concentrated in such a small area. It's really not worth it unless you need ECC RAM support, however.
 
All that CPU horsepower can't really be used today unless your app is written specifically for it. I have a q6600 and the *only* app I have except for orthos that can use all 4 cores at once is x264.exe... I tried lame-mt but it barely uses 1.5 cores. You can go here then look towards the back of the thread where a guy has a dual board with two quads on it and he can't even get x264.exe to use all 8 of his cores.

I think we're at a point in time where the hardware is ahead of the software hands down.

...what do you want to do with it (what apps are you going to run)?
 
The computer will be used mainly for Maya and Photoshop. I know those both support multi threading...question is, how many of those cores will actually be used.

Thanks for the suggestions! I think I've settled on not getting dual xeons and opting for a quad core 🙂
 
Photoshop CS and even Quickbooks only use 2 cores not all 4 at this time. But they were pretty quick to alter those apps to supprt a second core so it could be a short term fix
 
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