CPU comparisons

[daniil]

Which processor is better or faster?

 AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2.6Ghz, 2000HT, 2MB L2 Cache) or the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz, 1066FSB, 4MB L2 Cache)?

Which processor would be suitable for gaming?

And also what type of motherboard, ram and graphic card is recommended with either of these two processors?

[shoarthing]

At the moment & for the next few months performance-per-tick [ie per GHz] favours the C2D over the AMD equivalent - & C2Ds can be overclocked like billy-o, stretching their advantage.

I have no idea whatsoever about gaming [don't play games]: this is heavily biased towards specialised aspects of vid-card performance.

Fast storage [ie booting off a Raptor] more important for everyday noticeable performance than an extra few hundred MHz from the CPU.

I have a fairly up-to-date setup [bar the vidcard]:

Motherboard: Asus P5WDH Deluxe [has full support for PATA unlike the newer Intel-chipset motherboards]
CPU: Intel e6420 [2.13GHz] running at up to 3.2GHz
Memory: 4x 1GB PC6400 DDR2 [true 1.8v PC6400 - not the silly 'overclockers' stuff requiring 2v+ to run at 400MHz]
Vidcard: Asus Reversecool 6600
HDDs: Raptor boot HDD; 7200.10 data HDD; Firewire 800 portable RAID0 device.
PSU: specialised watercooled thing providing 460W [ample unless you are running a dual-vidcard setup]
Cooling: passive watercooling for everything [CPU/GPU/VRMs/Southbridge/Northbridge/HDDs/PSU]

 . . . FWIW I run mac OS X v 10.4.9 on this as the day-to-day OS.

[girdhar]

Hi,
I am also in the same boat.I have thinking to get CPU ,a new one .I am unable to decide  which processor should I buy so that I can work efficiently  on local intra net.

[shoarthing]

Hi,
I am also in the same boat.I have thinking to get CPU ,a new one .I am unable to decide  which processor should I buy so that I can work efficiently  on local intra net.

. .  perhaps you might make clear what you mean by 'intra net' . .  but in general, best bang-for-buck at the moment is any Core 2 Duo 200~266MHz FSB CPU combined with standard jedec-spec PC6400 DDR2.

[lordsmurf]

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to add a comment.

Having recently bought quad-core system, and already owning a pair of dual-cores, I can't say they're all that much faster than systems with single-core Intel or AMD+ CPUs from 2003-2005 timeframe. In fact, because of how software works, sometimes a single-core will work faster than multi-cores.

The only people that seem to gain big benefits from high-end computers are video game players. The rest of us just doing work could probably save money and opt for lower-end systems and get by perfectly fine.

I feel a bit of buyer's remorse on the quad-core, as video still takes 6-12 hours to process when heavily filtered.

I've been chronicling some of this over at http://www.digitalFAQ.com and http://forum.videohelp.com in the past month, in various posts.

Oh well!

[shoarthing]

lordsmurf - Hi - adding another opinion to this elderly thread, I must say my findings are the reverse of yours.

When using a modern OS & properly multithreaded applications; I find compilation - I make webkit from svn every morning - or video encodes - using, say, Handbrake to convert MPEG2 to H264 - a quadcore gives a big performance boost, roughly halving previous times for these tasks.

I assume you must be choosing to go about your tasks through a single-threaded bottleneck.

I don't play games at all, but understand they benefit chiefly from sheer GHz - ie at the same price-point a dual is normally preferred to a quad, with any extra dosh being 'invested' in today's hot vid-card.

The quad I have - an olde-worlde LGA775 95W Q6700 - runs remarkably cool, was an easy-peasy slip-in upgrade, & for me gave much the best bang-for-buck . . . . . .

[Graham]

I have needed to build several computers just lately which have been connected to the TVs in each room I have also upgraded the comps in the computer room, 9 or 10 in total so cost has been a big issue.  I have managed to pick motherboards, graphic cards and AMD+ CPUs up from Ebay ans HD and memory up from Aria.  I have used various speed CPUs depending on what they were being used for but most used AMD 5200, 2G memory, 2 x 1TB HD (RAID), various motherboards and all but 1 cost me less than £150 to build (inc case).  One cost me damn near that much just for the case, a Thermaltake Bach.  They are certainly faster than the 32bit IWill MPX2 motherboards I have just retired and the MPX2s were faster than any single core computer I have used.

[shoarthing]

I have needed to build several computers just lately which have been connected to the TVs in each room I have also upgraded the comps in the computer room, 9 or 10 in total so cost has been a big issue.  I have managed to pick motherboards, graphic cards and AMD+ CPUs up from Ebay ans HD and memory up from Aria.  I have used various speed CPUs depending on what they were being used for but most used AMD 5200, 2G memory, 2 x 1TB HD (RAID), various motherboards and all but 1 cost me less than £150 to build (inc case).  One cost me damn near that much just for the case, a Thermaltake Bach.  They are certainly faster than the 32bit IWill MPX2 motherboards I have just retired and the MPX2s were faster than any single core computer I have used.

. . yes; interesting that it is only recently that fairly ordinary retail dual-cores have improved on the overall performance of olde-worlde dual-Athlon boards from half-a-dozen years ago.

My sister - a professional photographer - is still using a dual-Athlon mobo, with 2GB of registered DDR & a modern~ish 250GH HBB -  & the thing is still pretty brisk, if noisy by present-day standards.

£150 a PC is pretty good going . . . . . if using Windows this presumably means that the cost of the OS equals the cost of the whole of the rest of the PC . . . . 

[Graham]

The noise and the wattage of the MPX2s is the main reason I decided to swap them otherwise I was quite happy to keep on using them as I had since 2002.

"£150 a PC is pretty good going . . . . . if using Windows this presumably means that the cost of the OS equals the cost of the whole of the rest of the PC . . . ."

Obviously £150 did not include a monitor but I didn't need any.  LCD monitors can be picked up for around £20 on ebay.