The Dual-Core vs. Quad-Core debate

[gamerk316]

Look, there are already tasks that clearly benifit from a Quad. The main issue is gaming performance.

Already, you are seeing games that are optimized for multiple cores. And furthermore, in some benchmarks, there is a dropoff using high end GPU's (285 or any dual GPU setup) with a Duo that does not exist with quads, leading me to reason that Duos will likely bottleneck the next GPU generation.

In short, unless its for a family PC, there is almost no reason to buy a duo at this point.

 

[Wisecracker]

For almost everyone on this site,for gamers,for small company networks...nobody has any gain over 2 cores with 4.

~ ~ ~

Pretty much this. Listen to the Old Guy.

'Multitasking' is more dependent upon the amount of RAMs and disk I/O. It was true in the 'Old Days' and it's true today: Your best boost in performance and long-term gain comes from additional memory.

I think the fallacy in this debate is the contention of "what is best for 5-6 years?" The answer to that question is ...

Nothing.

Buy for what you need today (as cheaply as you can) while being secure in the knowledge that the industry is doing everything in its power to make your investment obsolete as quickly as possible.

And they are getting really good at 'manufacturing obsolescence' and marketing the 'latest and greatest'.

 

[cjl]

^You necroed a age old thread.

Also a Core i7 can OC to 4.3GHz on air and the memory has ne relevance to the OCing since the CPUs speed is no longer tied to the FSB/memory FSB.

Soon there will be an age of low grade RAM and high OCing. But then again if you OC why get cheap RAM anyways?

Not exactly...

With the i7, the bclk is overclocked. However, the bclk is the reference clock for the memory. The lowest memory multiplier is for DDR3-800 at bclk 133, or 6x multiplier. Therefore, the slowest memory speed at a 200bclk is 1200MHz, and the slowest at a 220bclk is 1320MHz. Of course, these are rather extreme overclocks, and can still be handled by DDR3-1333 (which is fairly cheap as DDR3 goes), so it is true that you don't need to pay for some ridiculous DDR3-2000 or anything to get a high overclock, but it isn't completely independent of RAM yet either.