Hey, I'm choosing between two CPU's, an amd and an Intel Quad-core. Can someone help me pick, and say why? If you're a fanboy, go ahead and post, if you have something to say besides "Int3| iz teh r|_|1z0rz" or the like. Dig into your trenches, the battle between processors is on... Edit: I forgot, I'm planning to use this for heavy gaming and having it last for many years.

AMD's quad core is non "enthusiast" and as such lacks the OCing performance compared to Intel's quad cores (and general performance). As well, the fact that is a "true" quad core is making their manufacturing harder, as the probability of a dead core is doubled (I think).

AMD's new platform is kinda cool, but I'm not 100% informed on it. Spider

Are you thinking about a non quad-core AMD?

I personally went for Intel's Q6600.

Right now, I believe the Intel chips still blow the AMD ones out of the water in terms of both performance and heat. I've always been an AMD fanboy but there was no question but to go with the Core2 series in my latest machine (about 5mths old now).

Check tomshardware.com for the latest comparison tests. AMD may have made up some ground with their latest.

Still though, I've found that graphics card and HD speed make much more difference in gaming performance than CPU. An SLI 6800GTX setup on a RAID0 with a mediocre chip will likely pwn the best chip with lesser graphics cards and a slow HD.

-me

oops, forgot to specify what I'm looking at:P
Intel
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103866

EDIT: hate html on these forums, wouldn't show a link for the AMD chip, so I had to just paste the url.

Quote: Original post by brandonmanEDIT: hate html on these forums, wouldn't show a link for the AMD chip, so I had to just paste the url.

It's just standard HTML as if you were making a webpage. No tricks. Easy mode:

Intel
AMD

[EDIT: oh and if that's what you're deciding between, IIRC, Intel chip is better in every possible way (quad-core instead of dual, better performance, less heat, cheaper)]

-me

oops, I think I forgot the " after the url. I always forget that. Thanks for making up the link for me though. I think I'll go with an Intel then.

Hope you get the G0 stepping as indicated in the Tom's hardware review, then you can OC the bejezus out of it :)

If you're looking at the best performance, go Intel. AMD has just not been able to match them for speed recently.

If you plan on overclocking, Intel wins again in general. Of course, if you plan on overclocking you're going to want to choose a very specific chip, at which point brand ceases to matter - you just want the best OCer for your money.

If you want to build a quiet/energy efficient machine... either will do really. I believe AMD has a couple nice low-power chips out there.

I'm going to attempt to dissuade you from buying a quad-core chip. Unless you're doing something like running a database at the same time as you run a game server and a video game, you're not going to be making full use of it (heck, you probably wouldn't make full use of a quad core in that situation either). I obviously don't know what sort of things you're going to be using it for, but unless you really have a reason to buy quad-core, I wouldn't bother at this point. You can get a faster dual-core for the same price, which seems more of what you'd want anyway, given that you plan to do gaming with it.

Remember, 2x the cores doesn't mean 2x the speed!

That being said, do what you like :)

Quote: Original post by shiz98
I'm going to attempt to dissuade you from buying a quad-core chip. Unless you're doing something like running a database at the same time as you run a game server and a video game, you're not going to be making full use of it (heck, you probably wouldn't make full use of a quad core in that situation either). I obviously don't know what sort of things you're going to be using it for, but unless you really have a reason to buy quad-core, I wouldn't bother at this point. You can get a faster dual-core for the same price, which seems more of what you'd want anyway, given that you plan to do gaming with it.

Remember, 2x the cores doesn't mean 2x the speed!

That being said, do what you like :)

While 4 cores isn't twice the speed of 2 cores in general, depending on your hobbies they may make a big difference. If you are running high-end audio and video apps (Logic and Final Cut for us Mac people, I don't know the PC equivalents), then quad cores give a huge speed increase, as the task are easy to do in parallel, and the apps definitely support it. The other applications you will really appreciate it for is any sort of ray-tracing, especially if you are playing around with a real-time ray-tracer.

Even simpler stuff can benefit though, GCC is pretty good at taking advantage of multiple processors, and if you want to watch a movie while compiling a big project, a quad-core will still feel nice and responsive, where a dual-core will not.

Quote: While 4 cores isn't twice the speed of 2 cores in general, depending on your hobbies they may make a big difference. If you are running high-end audio and video apps (Logic and Final Cut for us Mac people, I don't know the PC equivalents), then quad cores give a huge speed increase, as the task are easy to do in parallel, and the apps definitely support it. The other applications you will really appreciate it for is any sort of ray-tracing, especially if you are playing around with a real-time ray-tracer.

Even simpler stuff can benefit though, GCC is pretty good at taking advantage of multiple processors, and if you want to watch a movie while compiling a big project, a quad-core will still feel nice and responsive, where a dual-core will not.

Oh yeah, there are definitely legitimate uses for quad-cores, but I'm just not sure if brandonman will find more benefit from them. Gaming, for example, usually makes much better use of extra Mhz than is does of extra cores.

From what I've read, GCC is only able to make minimal use of multiple cores as the bottleneck is IO bandwidth. It might end up being the case that a faster CPU will outperform a slower, multicore CPU, but this is just a guess.

I'm honestly surprised that compiling with GCC and watching a movie would cause the system to be a little unresponsive on a dual core - movies aren't generally that power-hungry (unless you're talking about HD). Even then, the responsiveness issue can be fixed with lowering GCC's task priority. Also keep in mind that the fact that a quad core is nice and responsive indicates that it's not being fully utilized.

Again, it all depends on what else you plan to do with the PC aside from gaming. The simple fact is that any hardware you buy today will be outdated in 1-2 years, so there's not really much point in buying a quadcore now because something "might need it" in the future. Just try to think about whether your applications will appreciate faster cores, or more cores.