Hi. I want to buy a new processor next week, and I have three choices:
1. Get Q6600 and then upgrade to Nehalem in 2009.
2. Get a good dual-core (E6750) and upgrade a year or two later
3. Get a really cheap dual-core (E2160) and wait for Penryn in January
I am a programmer, but I don't know much about hardware, so I'm asking if someone could help me make a decision.
I also wrote my comments on each choice. This is going to be long, I broke it down so it's easier to follow.
Option 2:
I should mention I don't really want to go with this option. I mean, what's the point of getting two cores when you can go for 4, considering it's only 40% more expensive, or even the same price?
The good:
A dual-core has a higher frequency and it can overclock much more for the same wattage; this will make ALL applications faster, even single threaded ones. There might also be the fact that Q6600 is limited by the FSB, as some said; and I also heard that Windows XP (which I intend to use for quite some time) does not use four cores as efficiently as Vista.
The bad:
I think a single core running even at 2400MHz is quite enough for most single threaded applications. I mean, how many darn frames do I need to run a game smoothly? The video board is probably going to be the bottleneck anyway. And if it's not, I can always overclock Q6600 to 2.8-3.2GHz when I want to run a particularly demanding application. But what if I want to run more applications simultaneously? An virus/spyware scan, burning a dvd, playing a game, and recoding a video so I can watch it on my mp4 player. THIS IS WHEN I NEED MORE POWER! I don't think this scenario is very far fetched. Q6600 should do a lot better in this case. I think the conclusion of many that a Q6600 is useful only in video coding applications or 3D rendering is plain wrong.
Option 3: Get a really cheap dual-core (E2160) and wait for Penryn in January
The good:
The new Penryn architecture is very promissing, and I heard of people who already managed to overclock one to 5.5GHz. It has SSE4 instructions, which make video coding a lot faster (by as much as 100% it seems), and also larger cache and other small improvements that seem to get you 5%-15% more performance in most applications, at the same clock speed. Also, the Penryn should be a lot more overclockable than anything we've seen before.
The bad:
I'll have to wait until January, maybe even February until they become available. Also, I'll have to sell the E2160 to get some of the money back.
I don't want to spend more than 266$ on processor; so I checked the possible prices that the Penryn processors should have, and I saw that the only quad-core processor that will have the same price as Q6600 is Q9300, which has only 6MB of cache, as opposed to the 8MB of cache of Q6600, a lower multiplier (than Q6600) and/or lower FSB speed (than other Penryns), and it seems to have the same TDP (95W). Will this be better than Q6600? And even 5-10% less performance in most tasks is not so bad for a Q6600.
Soo... what do you think? Do you think Penryn is worth waiting for in January / February?
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, another reason for me to wait for Penryn is that Core 2 architecture has bugs, although I heard they fixed some of these in the G0 revision.
1. Get Q6600 and then upgrade to Nehalem in 2009.
2. Get a good dual-core (E6750) and upgrade a year or two later
3. Get a really cheap dual-core (E2160) and wait for Penryn in January
I am a programmer, but I don't know much about hardware, so I'm asking if someone could help me make a decision.
I also wrote my comments on each choice. This is going to be long, I broke it down so it's easier to follow.
Option 2:
I should mention I don't really want to go with this option. I mean, what's the point of getting two cores when you can go for 4, considering it's only 40% more expensive, or even the same price?
The good:
A dual-core has a higher frequency and it can overclock much more for the same wattage; this will make ALL applications faster, even single threaded ones. There might also be the fact that Q6600 is limited by the FSB, as some said; and I also heard that Windows XP (which I intend to use for quite some time) does not use four cores as efficiently as Vista.
The bad:
I think a single core running even at 2400MHz is quite enough for most single threaded applications. I mean, how many darn frames do I need to run a game smoothly? The video board is probably going to be the bottleneck anyway. And if it's not, I can always overclock Q6600 to 2.8-3.2GHz when I want to run a particularly demanding application. But what if I want to run more applications simultaneously? An virus/spyware scan, burning a dvd, playing a game, and recoding a video so I can watch it on my mp4 player. THIS IS WHEN I NEED MORE POWER! I don't think this scenario is very far fetched. Q6600 should do a lot better in this case. I think the conclusion of many that a Q6600 is useful only in video coding applications or 3D rendering is plain wrong.
Option 3: Get a really cheap dual-core (E2160) and wait for Penryn in January
The good:
The new Penryn architecture is very promissing, and I heard of people who already managed to overclock one to 5.5GHz. It has SSE4 instructions, which make video coding a lot faster (by as much as 100% it seems), and also larger cache and other small improvements that seem to get you 5%-15% more performance in most applications, at the same clock speed. Also, the Penryn should be a lot more overclockable than anything we've seen before.
The bad:
I'll have to wait until January, maybe even February until they become available. Also, I'll have to sell the E2160 to get some of the money back.
I don't want to spend more than 266$ on processor; so I checked the possible prices that the Penryn processors should have, and I saw that the only quad-core processor that will have the same price as Q6600 is Q9300, which has only 6MB of cache, as opposed to the 8MB of cache of Q6600, a lower multiplier (than Q6600) and/or lower FSB speed (than other Penryns), and it seems to have the same TDP (95W). Will this be better than Q6600? And even 5-10% less performance in most tasks is not so bad for a Q6600.
Soo... what do you think? Do you think Penryn is worth waiting for in January / February?
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, another reason for me to wait for Penryn is that Core 2 architecture has bugs, although I heard they fixed some of these in the G0 revision.