[jake petre]

Hi,

I was looking into builiding my own computer at some point during 2010 and im only initially at
a very primative stage and I was wondering about Processors, i know a fair bit about hyper-threading
and multi-core but i have few questions.

What would be better?

Single core @3.0Ghz
Dual core @ 2.7
Triple core @2.5
Quad core @ 2.2

And are hyperthreaded Pentium 4's as relaible\effective as dual core pentium 4's

Thanks all,
Jake
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you know what "nemesis" means? A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent. Personified in this case by a...

[Advertisements]

Ignore the clock speeds, they mean nothing anymore.
A dual-core machine is the ideal minimum, however depending on what you want to do with the system will determine whether you ultimately opt for a dual, a triple or a quad. Ideally you shouldn't buy single-core now when you can get dual for very little extra.

With regards to hyper-threading, all Hyper-threading is is virtual cores and Windows would see two cores for every single core. Therefore if you were to go for a quad-core processor that supports hyper-threading and you had the option on, Windows would "see" 8 processors, four of which are virtual. As to whether it's better again depends on the software, some love it and others actually perform worse.

[Neil Jones]

Ignore the clock speeds, they mean nothing anymore.
A dual-core machine is the ideal minimum, however depending on what you want to do with the system will determine whether you ultimately opt for a dual, a triple or a quad. Ideally you shouldn't buy single-core now when you can get dual for very little extra.

With regards to hyper-threading, all Hyper-threading is is virtual cores and Windows would see two cores for every single core. Therefore if you were to go for a quad-core processor that supports hyper-threading and you had the option on, Windows would "see" 8 processors, four of which are virtual. As to whether it's better again depends on the software, some love it and others actually perform worse.

[mkau]

I personally think hyper threading is a terrible idea; it makes processors run quite a bit hotter (or so I believe; apparently the 3GHz version of the Prescott P4 HT has an 84w TDP, which if one thinks about it is unbelievably high for a single core - I mean really, there are quad cores that have a TDP only slightly higher!).

But yeah at minimum a two physical core processor is your best bet - the more cores the better, really. What processors are you looking at, specifically?