Yes, web browsing IS faster with a quad-core. (Caveats inside)

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, so it seems things are amazingly snappy with my new build, which just happens to be a quad-core i5-6400 @ 4.5, with Waterfox 49.0.3. (Yes, I know Firefox 50.0 is out - some people report crash issues with it.)

So, anyways, with e10s enabled in the last couple of versions of FF / WF, it made web browsing a little faster on my quad-core J1900 rig. So the new multi-process feature enables using a quad-core to speed things up a little bit.

My G4400 @ 4.45Ghz is pretty snappy too. But maybe not this snappy? The G4400 rig now has an Intel 600p 256GB PCI-E SSD, whereas this i5-6400 @ 4.5 has an AMD Radeon R3 120GB SSD. (A fairly fast SATA SSD.)

Some of it may be because I increased my internet speed from 25/25 to 50/50 (actually closer to 30/30 and 60/60), a week ago, and they shipped me a new "FIOS Quantum Gateway" router, which I just installed today, before I installed the quad-core i5 CPU.

So it could have been due to the new router too, in part. Hard to say, really.

Either way, I'm FLYING over these interwebs now with this box.

Edit: WOW. Newegg's pages load freakin' instantly.

Edit: Well, that was short-lived. I use the middle mouse-button to smooth-scroll in Waterfox, and it's sensitive to issues, causing it to hitch and pause. Well, that started happening, once I opened a bunch of Newegg links in new tabs to peruse later.

 

[sirmo]

I probably game about 5% of the time these days.. virtually all the software I use which requires me to wait on things benefits from more cores. I am done with quad cores.. kind of hoping for a 16 core 32thread CPU.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Edit: Well, that was short-lived. I use the middle mouse-button to smooth-scroll in Waterfox, and it's sensitive to issues, causing it to hitch and pause. Well, that started happening, once I opened a bunch of Newegg links in new tabs to peruse later.

Well, it's still Firefox. I get jerky scrolling even with only a single tab open.

It depends on the web page, but even on static text, it's still.... there.

There are web browser benchmarks you probably should be using, rather than subjective impressions.

 

[Ken g6]

There's more to the browsing experience than moar coars. My i3-6100 is much better than my Core 2 Q9400 was. Even with both having Nvidia video cards and SSDs.

I plan to upgrade to a Kaby Lake i7 at some point, so I guess I'll find out if more modern cores matter at that point.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I was also going to mention, that comparing my 4.45Ghz G4400 OC rig, to my Q9300 @ 2.85Ghz rig, both with SSDs and ample RAM, the G4400 rig pretty much outclasses the C2Q in every way, web browsing. Although, the C2Q isn't too shabby, watching 4K@60 YouTube, with the R7 260X 2GB card.

 

[pcslookout]

Well of course!

 

[Dave2150]

In general, the more expensive a CPU is, the faster it performs.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that a i5 is faster than a same generation Pentium in every single task out there, in fact it should be blatantly obvious.

Next we'll be making threads confirming that a 1TB SSD can indeed fit more data than a 128GB one

 

[VirtualLarry]

In general, the more expensive a CPU is, the faster it performs.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that a i5 is faster than a same generation Pentium in every single task out there, in fact it should be blatantly obvious.

It's not entirely that simple. Or at least, I don't think so. I current have the G4400 clocked at 4.62Ghz, the i5-6400 is at 4.5Ghz. It's only recently that Firefox / Waterfox got the multi-threading support to make a quad faster than a dual.

Edit: According to the CPU-Z 1.78 benchmark, my G4400 @ 4.62 scores 2340 ST / 4532 MT. A reference FX-8150 @ 3.60Ghz, is 803 ST / 5007 MT.

My "lowly" dual-core, is nearly 3x faster in single-threaded, and not quite but almost as fast as an eight-core CPU in multi-threaded. AMD sure has an uphill climb, LOL. (Is 8150 original Bulldozer?)

 

[Torn Mind]

It's your internet. Faster internet makes the sloths seem okay. An Atom box starves for faster internet so less CPU cycles are burned waiting.

Disable two or even three cores do the exact same thing, or go to like CNN, weather.com, or something.

The moar cores will help out if you have a huge load of background processes though, but that is more of a Chrome thing.

The bigger cache might be at work here though.

I have a 3770K and I am running it with two cores disabled. A handful Chrome tab open, and there is no difference in webpage loading.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It's not entirely that simple. Or at least, I don't think so. I current have the G4400 clocked at 4.62Ghz, the i5-6400 is at 4.5Ghz. It's only recently that Firefox / Waterfox got the multi-threading support to make a quad faster than a dual.

So why do you insist on using ____fox instead of Chrome? Have you just been moving the benchmarks so your tiny little dualies could keep up, or what?

 

[pcslookout]

So why do you insist on using ____fox instead of Chrome? Have you just been moving the benchmarks so your tiny little dualies could keep up, or what?

Chrome is garbage.

 

[daxzy]

So why do you insist on using ____fox instead of Chrome? Have you just been moving the benchmarks so your tiny little dualies could keep up, or what?

Like above poster said:

Chrome is garbage.

For a large number of reasons.

Also snappiness factor is hard to benchmark. So unless someone quantifies it in a usable metric, I think its all anecdotal to a certain point.

 

[Dave2150]

It's not entirely that simple. Or at least, I don't think so. I current have the G4400 clocked at 4.62Ghz, the i5-6400 is at 4.5Ghz. It's only recently that Firefox / Waterfox got the multi-threading support to make a quad faster than a dual.

Edit: According to the CPU-Z 1.78 benchmark, my G4400 @ 4.62 scores 2340 ST / 4532 MT. A reference FX-8150 @ 3.60Ghz, is 803 ST / 5007 MT.

My "lowly" dual-core, is nearly 3x faster in single-threaded, and not quite but almost as fast as an eight-core CPU in multi-threaded. AMD sure has an uphill climb, LOL. (Is 8150 original Bulldozer?)

If you read my post, you'd find I stated the following:

"It shouldn't come as a surprise that a i5 is faster than a same generation Pentium in every single task out there, in fact it should be blatantly obvious."

Are you suggesting otherwise? Which task is a same generation Pentium faster than an i5?

Don't change subject and introduce AMD FX CPU's into the mix, that's just moving goalposts to save face.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So why do you insist on using ____fox instead of Chrome? Have you just been moving the benchmarks so your tiny little dualies could keep up, or what?

I don't "do" Chrome. I don't use Google either.

 

[sirmo]

I don't "do" Chrome. I don't use Google either.

Don't use Google? what do you use instead? Bing?

 

[Torn Mind]

Soon, Larry will become another escrow4, but nicer. He's an X170 system away from his Constantine moment. Or maybe it will be a "Zen" moment. The time is imminent regardless.

 

[Ranulf]

Firefox is just getting worse and worse. 50.0 is pretty meh so far on my 8350 (ssd) and it hasn't been great before that. Newegg is a pain especially with no script turned on.

 

[mikeymikec]

Don't use Google? what do you use instead? Bing?

Maybe he's spent years looking for the slowest search engine possible.

It's your internet. Faster internet makes the sloths seem okay.

One of my customers has a "desktop" AMD E-350 system with an 850 PRO SSD and on an Internet connection that's at least five times faster than my own (I use a Haswell i5). Fresh Win10 install. Browsing still takes ages longer on his. To emulate the same experience/performance on my PC, I would probably need to reduce the total memory in my PC down to 1GB and replace the boot SSD with a 5400rpm spinner.

Chrome is garbage.

There's literally not a single metric by which Chrome can be reasonably defined as garbage.

 

[amenx]

Browsers are not CPU intensive. Internet speed or 'snappiness' will have little to do with CPU cores, unless as mentioned there other background processes overwhelming the CPU. The OP mentioned other more likely causes for better browsing performance and I think those may have more to do with it than CPU. Web video performance however may use up more GPU resources (if hardware acceleration enabled).

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2016/06/comparison-cpu-gpu-usage-4-browsers/

 

[mikeymikec]

Browsers are not CPU intensive. Internet speed or 'snappiness' will have little to do with CPU cores, unless as mentioned there other background processes overwhelming the CPU. The OP mentioned other more likely causes for better browsing performance and I think those may have more to do with it than CPU. Web video performance however may use up more GPU resources (if hardware acceleration enabled).

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2016/06/comparison-cpu-gpu-usage-4-browsers/

Try reading your own link and watching the accompanying video:

"All those four browsers did was render an animation involving fading images on microsoft.com".

Yeah, because that sounds like a typical scenario for a web browser. Watch the video carefully, do you even see a single page load?

Even the most basic test blows their testing methodology out of the water (when viewed for the purpose of aiding your argument). Even fairly minimalist website designs result in higher CPU loads than 3%. Two websites I've designed that load on my PC in a split second still result in 13% CPU usage during the loading time, and the online banking site I use hits 17% CPU usage for a moment.

The only point that I agree with you on is that I'm sure that on many machines, background processes will be affecting performance.

 

[NTMBK]

Browsers are not CPU intensive. Internet speed or 'snappiness' will have little to do with CPU cores, unless as mentioned there other background processes overwhelming the CPU. The OP mentioned other more likely causes for better browsing performance and I think those may have more to do with it than CPU. Web video performance however may use up more GPU resources (if hardware acceleration enabled).

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2016/06/comparison-cpu-gpu-usage-4-browsers/

Add a pile of badly written JavaScript frameworks, badly written ads, a mountain of tracking... And it gets pretty intensive.

God, I miss the old days of flat HTML.

 

[Torn Mind]

Browsers are not CPU intensive. Internet speed or 'snappiness' will have little to do with CPU cores, unless as mentioned there other background processes overwhelming the CPU. The OP mentioned other more likely causes for better browsing performance and I think those may have more to do with it than CPU. Web video performance however may use up more GPU resources (if hardware acceleration enabled).

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2016/06/comparison-cpu-gpu-usage-4-browsers/

Oh, a laptop that is packing Core i5 heat blows through a light workload that is not representative of real web browers?
Try running a bunch of news sites, weather.com, 7 Ebay windows, and 7 Amazon windows and get back to us. . I want those sites loaded immediately. No waiting because that extra script has suffocated a poor Atom yet again and I'm waiting an entire minute to get responsiveness. Running Notepad is not CPU intensive, and Atoms don't choke on that. Atoms do drag on sites like Facebook, and pretty much using the website unbearable.

 

[Piroko]

There's literally not a single metric by which Chrome can be reasonably defined as garbage.

It kills battery life, is a memory hog and - something I just found out yesterday - has major issues with hardware acceleration of older systems. Just opening the Amazon Prime video player on a core 2 duo laptop freezes the whole system for seconds at a time. No such thing with Edge.

I still prefer to use Chromium based browsers, but to call it flawless is an overstatement par excellence.

As to the topic, yea, it's faster. A faster internet connection helps more, but a quad core just bumps the consistency of my experience up a notch, especially when I'm the one who is multitasking on my PC.

 

[coffeemonster]

Chrome still cant change tab bar position, cant change close tab button, cant change bookmark bar position, cant arrange extension icon order, cant really do much at all with the interface. not as many extensions(especially ones I've used for over a decade), url bar drop down results from typing is a joke compared with FF. Not as many right-click options. Loading webpages is not perceivably faster.
Pretty much everything I do/use on a web browser is better in FF than chrome.

I was hoping vivaldi would be the fusion of FF usability on the blink engine but it's not there yet.

 

[lolek86]

Larry, how does that 6400 feels on stock clock? Still snappy or much less ? and then how it compares to g4400oc?