A PC Question

[Morepower]

I was wondering if anyone could tell me the difference between a Pentium 4, 3.2Ghz processor and a Intell Duo Core 2.4Ghz processor. What I mean by that is is there a big difference in speed ? The reason I want to know is I am about to buy another Laptop but I can't find one as fast as the one I have now, it's 3.2Ghz. All I can find now is a max. of 2.8Ghz, which is bloody expensive !! It just seems strange to me for PCs to be going backwards in speed, unless i'm missing something ?

Thanks

 

[timelord]

Good thing you mention this Morepower, as I've just got a laptop with a duel core intel centrino duo. My other laptop has a 1.7Ghz processor in it. The duel core has two 1.6Ghz processors in it but and runs applications extremely fast, not to mention the battery life on the laptop itself is almost trebled compared to my older 1.7Ghz.
All in all the 2 processors seem to be doing the job with less stress than a single processor. A 2.8Ghz each processor (each core) would be extremely fast compared to a single at 3.2Ghz.
I'm no real computer geek but this is my thinking on this subject and I'm sure we have a resident geek in da building that could help us out more here hopefully

 

[SenKat]

The dual core 2.8 will smoke the crap outta the single mode 3.2ghz processor ANY day ! That is a super fast system, and well worth it - feed it the MAXIMUM RAM you can find for it, too

 

[a_pyro_is]

It's not worth it without 4 Gigs of the best RAM you can find.

But with enough RAM to avoid too bad a bottleneck it will blow any single core away!

 

[LarryQ]

It's not worth it without 4 Gigs of the best RAM you can find.

But with enough RAM to avoid too bad a bottleneck it will blow any single core away!

However, Unless you are running the 64 Bit version of XP or Vista..your OS will not see anything over 3.12 (Or So...) of the ram.

Core 2 Duos will SMOKE any single core Pentium that Intel ever made...

They actually went back to the Pentium 3 core design with the Core 2 , as it was MUCH MORE efficient than the Pen4 core.

LarryQ

 

[timelord]

That's what I'm using on Vista business and it's fast as f+%*

 

[Greyfox]

The Core Duo and Core 2 Duo chips are amazing. Don't let the clock speed fool you. They're far more efficient, capable, and they'll blow away any single core machine even if you're using older software. There's a very good reason Apple switched to them for use in the new Macintosh machines.

 

[Morepower]

Cool, thanks guys.  I knew this would be a good place to ask.  This is the Laptop i'm going to get then:http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1730?c=au&cs=audhs1&l=en&s=dhs
It comes with 2 x 160Gb HDs which will be plenty for me.

Now you guys have shed some light on the speed matter I will get the 2.4Ghz version, as the 2.8Ghz is another $1280.00 more to upgrade to.  Also it comes with 2Gb of RAM, would it be worth it to upgrade to 4Gb for an extra $398.00 ?  Or is 2Gb going to be enough taking into account the extra cash vs extra performance ?  Bear in mind I don't use it to play games, I just want it to do everything FAST because, well, i'm an impatient bastard !!!

Oh and i'm getting RED because it should make it go even faster

 

[marianne]

the thing with CPUs is that clock speed really isn't a measure of performance at all. if you take 2 chips of the exact same CPU model with different speeds then yes, one will be faster than the other, but if you try to compare 2 different types of CPU (even by the same manufacturer), it's an absolutely worthless measure. Intel tried to pretend for a long time that higher clock speeds were better, as their competitors were making CPUs that were faster at lower clock speeds (this is why AMD rate a chip something like 5200+ at 2600MHz - they're saying it'd be the equivalent of a 5200MHz pentium 4), then Intel trapped themselves by their own "higher clock speeds are better" marketing crap, physics prevents clock speeds getting much higher than they are now without generating obscene amounts of heat. but yeah, the newer chips, such as core duo or even it's single core equivalent, are much much faster at lower clock speeds than CPUs 2 or 3 years ago. people just have to get out of the mentality of "higher clock speeds are better" that Intel pushed for years

as for RAM, more RAM is almost always better, especially if you want to run a lot of programs at the same time. you will probably get some speed boost out of using 4GB instead of 2GB, more noticeable if you're likely to have a lot running at once. i run with 2GB currently and seem to be doing mostly fine, although i want to upgrade to 4GB soon, sometimes there are too many programs competing for resources even for 2GB to handle on my system.

 

[JacKz5o]

Yep, clock speeds are no longer everything. A Core 2 Duo doing 12 flOPs per clock @ 2.4GHz will smoke a Pentium4 doing 6flOPs @ 3.2Ghz. So technically, a C2D is twice as fast as a P4 at the same speeds. Not to mention the enormous amount of L2 cache the C2D chips have that can speed up memory intensive applications even more.

Also, keep in mind that a dual-core will not always be better than a single core processor. A 2.8GHz Pentium D when compared to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 might not always be faster, in most circumstances, the performance will actually be less. Most applications these days are still single-threaded meaning even if you have two cores the application itself will only use one, the single 2.8GHz core while leaving the other core idling.

Even though dual-cores are becoming much more mainstream with quad-cores soon to be taking their places, software developers still need to catch up on their multi-threaded coding.

 

[Greyfox]

Also, keep in mind that a dual-core will not always be better than a single core processor. A 2.8GHz Pentium D when compared to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 might not always be faster, in most circumstances, the performance will actually be less. Most applications these days are still single-threaded meaning even if you have two cores the application itself will only use one, the single 2.8GHz core while leaving the other core idling.

Even though dual-cores are becoming much more mainstream with quad-cores soon to be taking their places, software developers still need to catch up on their multi-threaded coding.

True. Some applications and tasks will not benefit much from it, but I've found that Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X all can shift these intensive single-thread applications to one core while other tasks are performed on the second. That, in itself, provides a bit of benefit in responsiveness of the operating system and other things happening alongside a big process. IMHO, at least, that is still far preferable to something sluggish and unusable for the duration of one CPU-intensive task.

 

[Morepower]

the thing with CPUs is that clock speed really isn't a measure of performance at all. if you take 2 chips of the exact same CPU model with different speeds then yes, one will be faster than the other, but if you try to compare 2 different types of CPU (even by the same manufacturer), it's an absolutely worthless measure. Intel tried to pretend for a long time that higher clock speeds were better, as their competitors were making CPUs that were faster at lower clock speeds (this is why AMD rate a chip something like 5200+ at 2600MHz - they're saying it'd be the equivalent of a 5200MHz pentium 4), then Intel trapped themselves by their own "higher clock speeds are better" marketing crap, physics prevents clock speeds getting much higher than they are now without generating obscene amounts of heat. but yeah, the newer chips, such as core duo or even it's single core equivalent, are much much faster at lower clock speeds than CPUs 2 or 3 years ago. people just have to get out of the mentality of "higher clock speeds are better" that Intel pushed for years

as for RAM, more RAM is almost always better, especially if you want to run a lot of programs at the same time. you will probably get some speed boost out of using 4GB instead of 2GB, more noticeable if you're likely to have a lot running at once. i run with 2GB currently and seem to be doing mostly fine, although i want to upgrade to 4GB soon, sometimes there are too many programs competing for resources even for 2GB to handle on my system.

Hey thanks again guys, I was able to understand most of that. All good and relatively simple explanations for a PC dumbard like me. ;D ;D

Marianne I stuck with the 2GB of RAM as I am already spending way more than I wanted to, I would definitly have gone the 4GB but $400 was just too much extra at this point. But it's not to say I can't upgrade to 4GB later on. My only concern is that I keep hearing bad things about doing that because of the new RAM not being the same as the old or from the same batch ?? Does this make any sense to anyone ? Or is it just some sort of Myth ?

Oh BTW i'm expecting delivery of it TODAY