Thoughts on these 2 processors??

[FinanceDude]

I have a line on two Dell desktops almost brand new, on craigslist.

One has the Intel E2220 Dual Core

the other has the Intel Q6600.

I have heard the Q6600 is the bomb. Both are the same price and almost same setup. Thoughts? Where's bacon boy when I need him.....

 

[FUEGO]

I just got my Q6600 and it is the bomb. Looks like the Q6600 is better in most respects. I'd say pick the q6600 - should be more future proof as more apps are developed to exploit multiple cores (more than just 2). That was my thinking anyway in picking q6600 over slightly faster dual core chips for similar prices.

 

[FinanceDude]

I just got my Q6600 and it is the bomb. Looks like the Q6600 is better in most respects. I'd say pick the q6600 - should be more future proof as more apps are developed to exploit multiple cores (more than just 2). That was my thinking anyway in picking q6600 over slightly faster dual core chips for similar prices.

Fuego, I sent you a PM..........

 

[riskadverse]

I've owned an E4300 dual and currently the Q6600. If you're a heavy CPU user the Q6600 is much better. I could peg the E4300, but can't on the Q6600 unless I have 4 serious problems - and even then it runs reasonably well. Note: I didn't overclock either, and I am not a big gamer.

 

[FUEGO]

Yeah, I haven't been able to make my 4 cpu's max out at more than 60-70%, even running a modern graphics intensive computer game, windows media player playing mp3s, vlc playing highly compressed .avi's, a bunch of background apps open, and running a bittorrent transfer application moving some big files over the network (all at the same time). Part of the reason is that it is brand new, hence junkware and spyware free and smoking fast. I also installed a decent graphics card that takes a load off the CPUs when running graphics intensive apps.

 

[Neongreen]

Simple:

One has four cores, the other two. Overclocking can eliminate any clockspeed differences between them.

Go for the Q6600, you'll have four CPUs behind you instead of two. More and more applications are learning to take advantage of this!

 

[Midpack]

I have a Q6600. I was surprised how much faster this PC is than my old P4.

 

[ERD50]

Simple:

One has four cores, the other two. Overclocking can eliminate any clockspeed differences between them.

Go for the Q6600, you'll have four CPUs behind you instead of two. More and more applications are learning to take advantage of this!

I dunno, but a tech friend of mine went the opposite way - he said there are very few programs that can take good advantage of four cores.

Do you know of any good tests done on this - I'd be curious to see some real data?

The upcoming ( Q1 or Q2 2009) 'Snow Leopard' release of OSX is supposed to provide more multi-core support (and/or make it easier for developers to update programs to take advantage of multi-cores). It'll be interesting to see if that is significant, or just a little marketing flap.

-ERD50

 

[Neongreen]

the E2xxx line is the slower generation of the new processors - hence why it still carries the branding "Pentium", whereas the Qxxxx and E4xxx onwards line is the faster generation of the new processors, hence why they carry the branding "Core 2". The reason why I suspect the E2xxx is the same price is it was recently introduced(again, slower generation so it might enjoy some speed benefits by being more recent but probably just a clockspeed increase), whereas the Q6600 is from the beginning of this generation. Additionally, the Quad core has two more cores to boot and eight times the L2 cache(1MB vs 8MB) - while this won't make a massive difference, it's good when doing CPU intensive operations as more calculation routines can be fit in the chips memory, resulting in it not having to go back and forth from your system memory.

Unfortunately a quick google couldn't find any benchmarks for you to look at, which are also generally pretty skewed to quad cores since most benchmarking platforms can take advantage of all the cores. I find myself _regularly_ maxing out both my cores, but that's probably because I run my processor(E4300) at the stock 1.8GHz instead of 3.4GHz I used to run it at.

Additionally, a thing to note that as a generation becomes older, the manufacturer 'learns' how to produce faster chips with a higher success rate, and 'speedbins' them better(sorts them against their maximum clock speed more effectively) - this is why the E2xxx was probably introduced, as they could finally provide a large enough quantity which would be fully stable at 2.4GHz. Also, -don't- quote me on this but I believe the E2xxx chips are just normal chips which didn't pass the cache tests and thus have some disabled.

Disclaimer: I used to deal in building computers, etc, a few years ago, but lots can change so if you see something factually wrong, please feel free to correct me!

 

[riskadverse]

As others have pointed out, most programs cannot take advantage of the additional processors concurrently. In addition, when you initiate a program it usually goes to processor zero, which means you always load that first processor. You can choose which processor will handle the program, but it is a cumbersome process at best. I would guess that Intel and/or Microsoft will improve the handling of the CPU sharing, but it is not there yet. I like the option of running a batch program, virus scan, download and game all at the same time, so the quad was the perfect answer for me. My computer bottlenecks now are related to disk access, so I'll soon be adding more disk drives.

 

[Neongreen]

The Q6600 is the way to go. If you disable two cores on the Q6600, it will still be as fast, if not faster(in some calculations), than the E2220. For the same price, you could get two cores and a bunch of cache extra.

It's a pretty straightforward choice really.

 

[clifp]

Which processor is faster was never an easy question to answer,but it certainly has gotten far more complicated since I left my job marketing microprocessor at Intel 9 years ago.

I also couldn't find any benchmarks for the E2220 vs Q6600. Looking at the microarchitecture. They have the same clock speed and same speed front side bus (interface to the memory). The Q6600 has a 8 megabyte cache vs 1 Megabyte for the E2220, more is definitely better. Quad core is definitely better than two core but not twice as good. On the other hand the E2220 is a Conroe processor which is newer generation than the Q6600 and presumably has some greater efficiency. (i.e. gets more work done per gigahertz).

Finally, and probably most importantly the Intel website lists the Q6600 having a list price of $189 vs the E2220 of $75. So while I'd be lying if I said we always priced our chips by relative performance (i.e a $200 chip is twice as fast as $100 chip), we were careful to price on absolute price. So $189 is much more than $75 so if all other things were equally I go for the Q6600 system.

On a personal note, I got a Q9300 in Sept (slightly faster than Q6600) and the system is really fast even with some pretty intensive games and High Def video looks great.