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Cores vs. Ghz


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I am planning on building my own hackintosh and have been looking at CPU's and came across the question: is it better to have more cores with a slower processor (i.e. Quad Core @ 2.5 Ghz) or a faster processor with fewer cores (i.e. Core 2 Duo @ 3.16 Ghz)? Keep in mind I plan on using this for the Final Cut Studio programs primarily and attempting to save money (or i would just get the i7 @ 3.2 Ghz and avoid confusion). Any help or if you can point me to the way of somewhere i could read about it would be greatly appreciated.

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My personal opinion would be to have more cores.

If you have money to burn you might as well just get the i7 @ 3.2Ghz

Basically we have hit a wall with clock speed, so the only way to make faster machines cheaply is to add more cores to the processor die.

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  • 2 weeks later...
IMO you should discuss this with people who know the applications you are using. The value of multiple cores varies heavilly depending on the particular application.

 

Do you mean, like, an internet forum or something like that? Maybe there is one out there. Any tips? Oh, I got one. This is a really good one....http://www.insanelymac.com/forum

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I would say cores; even if a higher clock speed on a core2duo led to shortly smaller execution times, the quad core will give you much more expandability as things become more truly multi-threaded. I've upgraded to a quad core and now I don't know how I lived without it.

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This is the best explanation that I have come up with, and it is from looking at (far to many) benchmarks for single and multi-threaded tasks.

 

Clock speed of the CPU combined with memory burst rate will directly correlate to how fast your system is "under the mouse" - that is to say, how fast will the menus, dock, desktop, and so on, will respond to your input, render web pages, -- basically interactive response times.

 

Number of cores will correlate to how fast you can do larger jobs (that are multi-threaded and multi-core 'ready') - for example, converting your video from one format to another; say DVD -> H.264

 

Currently, most games will work hard a single-core -- Mac OS X helps some with a multi-threaded GL engine -- some more recent games are multi-threaded.

 

So in order to make a "best for you" decision; you'll need to decide whether "under the mouse" or the overall system performance is more important.

 

OR, and as many of us have done, built a Quad Core system, Overclock to 4GHz, and forget about it. :(

 

Suggestions:

* Everyday web surfing machine, with some simple photo and web work, faster dual core machine

* Hard core video encoding, compression, more cores.

* Gaming -- BOTH! B) As many super fast cores as possible.

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A 4 ghz core 2 duo will outperform a 2.5 to 3 ghz core 2 quad in most cases.

 

It also depends on what core is compared to what core. Example, in most cases a single core athlon venice, can outperform a netburst pentium D. But, a conroe based core 2 duo can outperform a k10 based phenom in most cases.(Not a phenom II) You do have to keep number of cores, and ghz in mind, but you also need to keep in mind the architecture of the core, and how efficient is it. Netburst is not efficient at all. Even when Netburst broke the 4 ghz barrier, there was not much of a difference between 4 ghz and stock. Then even more when an Athlon FX at 2.6 ghz can beat a pentium d at 4 ghz. But then, look at an E8400 overclocked to 4 ghz, and notice how much of a difference there is stock.

In my experience, clock speed significantly affects render/conversion speed of movies/videos.

 

PD 820 @ 2.8GHz beats C2Q Q6600 @ 2.4GHz

 

Something is wrong with that core 2 quad then, because a Celeron conroe dual core beats out any Pentium D 8 series. There's no way a pentium d would even come close to a core 2 quad, let alone a core 2 duo at that. Maybe in tdp, the pentium d outputs more heat and wattage.

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I would go for more cores. Why? Simply stated: a single core can execute a single thread at any given moment (multitasking is just an "illusion" given by the operating system). the more powerful this single core is in terms of clock rate, the faster this thread will execute. this is what people referred to as the "free lunch": to make your programs go faster, you simply incrase the clock of the processor and more instructions will execute per second. this is basically gone, clocks beyond the 3GHz barrier have a lot of problems with overheating. to solve the thing and continue increasing processing power, multicore was invented. multicore is not a free lunch anymore: you don't automatically get every single program going faster. what you get is that multiple threads can execute at any given moment (a sort of physical multitasking). given this assumption, making programs faster means splitting their operation in different threads which will then run in parallel instead of in sequence. as you can easily find out yourself, if I can split a 10 second job in two jobs taking 5 seconds each and have them run together, the overall job will finish in half the time.

now, everyone knows the free lunch is over, and modern software will exploit as much as technically possible the chance to run multiple threads together to increase its performance. the more cores you have the more threads your programs will create, the better they will perform (some have even imagined schemes in which the number of spawned threads is proportional to the number of cores on the users' machines) :-)

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I'm afraid ther's not a simple nor absolute answer to your question. The most appropriate way to help you is to research on benchmarks that may show tests on different hardware running your desired software, or somehow technically similar applications.

 

I would suggest you -as an example, to surf to Tom's Hardware page and check one of their latest benchmarks (please don't forget the disclaimers):

 

You may find other useful tests regarding your interests, that may enlighten your mind to make an informed decision.

 

Informed may not mean the best, especially as your particular case may not fit exactly in the ones presented, but it's a good guide to think on how performance is affected by CPU freq, core count, cache, technology, instruction sets, FSB, RAM, disk I/O...

 

Good luck!

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
I am planning on building my own hackintosh and have been looking at CPU's and came across the question: is it better to have more cores with a slower processor (i.e. Quad Core @ 2.5 Ghz) or a faster processor with fewer cores (i.e. Core 2 Duo @ 3.16 Ghz)? Keep in mind I plan on using this for the Final Cut Studio programs primarily and attempting to save money (or i would just get the i7 @ 3.2 Ghz and avoid confusion). Any help or if you can point me to the way of somewhere i could read about it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hi,

i think you should use Quad core its much better and speed is very good or if low budget then use core 2 du

 

 

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In my experience, clock speed significantly affects render/conversion speed of movies/videos.

 

PD 820 @ 2.8GHz beats C2Q Q6600 @ 2.4GHz

 

That depends on the application... My Q8200 is almost 4 times faster encoding x264 in handbrake than my previous Core 2 Duo running at 2.3GHz...

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Yeah.. it depends on if the app is written to utilize multiple cores. But one thing for sure is fsb and cpu clock speed plays a major role is performance.

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