How effectively are 6 and 8 core CPU's used in Win 7 Pro 64 bit?

SubZero

I have quad core for now but would ask if you have Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, how effectively can you make use of 6 or 8 cores?

Are more cores automatically load balanced for most efficient operation? Or past 4 core does Windows 7 Pro 64 bit not make use of those cores very well?

Thank you for helping

mciahel

As usually, it depends on the applications.
Games still profit from single core performance, less cores but higher CPU frequency is preferred.
If you are running multi-core optimized applications, then obviously more cores are needed.

For the usual surf-office-occasional game computer, quadcores should be powerful enough.

Michael

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SubZero

For AMD 4100 at 3.6 ghz for 4 core but for only $70 more AMD 8150 with 8 core can be had.

I have Quad Core 965 AMD in one machine and Intel 980X extreme 6 core.

I am unsure of any advantage 6 core Intel would have over 4 core intel for Gaming, but for multithreaded video rendering at 64 bit, would 6 core be better and 8 core best?

UTR

For the software I use I have trouble telling the speed difference between dual core and quad core CPUs. As was said earlier, it comes down to the software you use and/or how many programs you run at the same time. Even programs that are capable of using all eight cores may not perform better with an eight core versus dual core CPU if the program doesn't have high CPU demands in the first place.

AllanDeGroot

What I notice in the difference between dual core and quad core when doing video file conversions is that if I'm letting the video processing run in the background I simply don't notice that it's running because it isn't slowing down what I'm running up front.


and I'm running a three year old system with a Q9450...

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debro

If you are encoding video, or graphics rendering constantly, an 8 core or 6 core will benefit you. If you are gaming, or just generally
emailing, surfing the internet, and watching videos, a high clock dual core is adequate, and the money would be better spent , like a kickass video card, or upgrade to an ssd.

If you occasionally encode videos while using your pc, a quad core is probably a good buy.

If y aou buy a 6/8 core cpu and you aren't flogging it to death with video encoding or heavy rendering, then you are wasting money, and electricity.

6/8 chores cpus typically idle at full power load of a dual core cpu, of not higher, and possibly even waste enough to power a low end quad core at full tilt.

Despite intels marketing, quad cores or more are absolutely useless to the vast majority of people, and as I said above, a waste of money and electricity. Don't fall for the hype. An i3 is more than adequate for most people, and i5 for technically advanced, poor the amd equivalents.

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SubZero

Thank you for replies

I have intention of possible AMD 4 core or 8 core for using PowerDirector Ultra 64 to process movies. It has a YouTube upload feature built in and so would process videos and upload at the same time, using more threads.

There would be large file copy operations, audio recording, conversion and saving, etc.

It would seem AMD bulldozer is more like AMD Tonka Truck for gaming compare to Intel so I would not get new AMD for that. I have excellent Intel 980X extreme setup with 3GIG GTX 580 running my 30" LCD mostly at 2048x1536.

But new information and curiosity is about Windows 7 64 bit can actually use cores for above tasks as mentioned.

I could even host an MFC device to print, scan, etc from USB on that machine and get thread benefit, correct?

Windows 7 takes care of all cores present for such operations?

Thank you for helping

CDan

Always go with the best clock speed, not the number of cores. Clock speed rules.

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Dartman

My AMD hex core seems to be using all cores equally when I go into the task manager and look at the CPU performance tabs. Video encoding is a lot faster, everything else is like said, not noticeably faster because most things don't use all the cores well.
Intel chips seem to be better at video encoding then the AMD's but the AMD chips tend to be a lot cheaper to buy and build so it goes back to bang for buck for me.
I also play a few games and have a older ATI 4870x2 that I run my games at 1920x1080 and they play smooth and nice 90 percent of th time so I'm happy for the money I spent.
If you can stay a few generations back you can get fast bargains that still do everything well. If you have the money, and make money doing something like video encoding and things get the fastest most expensive solution, otherwise gauge your needs and budget.
When this box is sitting here surfing it draws about 250 watts +/-, when it's full bore gaming I'm at 500 and had to get a single rail 850 watt PSU to run the video card, when it's sleeping it draws 1 watt

SubZero

So Phenom II X4 965 at 3.4ghz is better choice than Phenom II X6 1100T at 3.3ghz?

debro

Uploading videos to youtube will possibly use 1% of your CPU time .. of one core ... if you round the figure up to the nearest percentage ....

The thread-handling for the current AMD bulldozer chips is not correct in windows 7 .. but apparently they will be in windows 8, giving a large boost in performance (apparently).

Current Intel ix-2 & soon to be released ix-3- series CPU's have hardware H264 video encoding, but only when using the intel video GPU .. might wait for the i3 series to launch ... because i2 series requires you to be using the onboard intel GPU, or it's processed (slowly) by the CPU.

File copying is extremely low CPU bandwidth. With Direct Memory Access (DMA) the cpu is literally disconnected from the memory bus for most of the transfer time, and is processing other things.

Transferring scanned images from USB is also very slow ... but once it actually gets into memory, a fast multi-core processor will help process images - in terms of applying different image rendering techniques/masks/correction algorithmns ... if it's just scanning and saving, a dual core CPU is more than adequate.

According to here performance was more than adequate on a phenom 2 when mixing 3 HD video streams .. a bit jerky when mixing 4 video streams, and almost unusable when mixing 5 HD video streams.

I'm not entirely sure why you need to upgrade your rig from a Intel 980X extreme for some basic video encoding ... unless you intend to be gaming & processing/encoding Hidef Videos simultaneously.

I'd have suggested that you could also use your video card to encode video's, but nvidia has been proven to have intolerably poor video output quality when using GPU encoding ...

For what you need, it seems like you could get away with a small cheap i3-2xx PC and a $50 KVM switch.

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debro

Check some review sites for:
1) Speed between the 965 & 1100
2) Power difference.

I'd expect ... approx 20% speed difference when encoding H264 videos, and a 50% increase in full load power, and an extra 30W in idle.

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SubZero

I will not upgrade my 980x extreme. I wish to offload some tasks to other machine to free up 980x extreme for gaming and recording.

I have tried hardware encoding in PowerDirector Ultra 64 and it does give very bad results in quality. Speckles and noise introduced each time. Software encoding in MPEG4 is faster than realtime and look fine. But auto-youtube upload in 15 min parts is a realtime operation and consumes much time. But it is more convenient than making MPEG4 and trying to use splitter since youtube rejects files without proper full headers sometimes. With splitter I may try uploading 4 times before it "takes" but with WMV's generated by youtube function they upload fine each time.

Thank you for detail reply.

SubZero

Thank you for reply

I think upgrading from 4 gig RAM to 16 gig RAM (max onboard) and using only 4 core 965 gives best result for the money. Good for processing large video and audio files, images, screen capture, etc.

I have 12 gig RAM in Intel 980x extreme system but may later try to 24 gig RAM if it will be cost efficient.

Thank you for helping

debro

I suspect an intel i3-2 with a cheap motherboard using the intel integratedd video would be the best bang for buck , especially since you've advised that it's solely for encoding video & uploading vids to youtube.

Quicksync support was added to Power Director back in version 9, i can only assume it's been retained for version 10.

As advised in wikipedia, quicksync transcoded a 5 minute 1080p video to 1024x768 in 22 seconds versus a GPU transcode 83/86 seconds, and a CPU/software transcode took 172 seconds.

AMD cpu's do not have quicksync.

Newegg lists an intel mATX motherboard + i3-2120 for $70 + $135 = $205 total.


Newegg lists a 6-Core AMD FX-6100 (3.3GHz) & Gigabyte motherboard at $150 + $50 = $200.

The intel solution uses (max) 65W ... the AMD solution uses (max) 95W, plus need a dedicated video card. Doesn't sound like alot, but the intel i3-2 will breeze through encoding with minimum energy use ... the AMD solution will brute-force it at maximum heat ... maximum power, and maximum noise.

Your choice.

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SubZero

I have found a Fatality branded board that includes no onboard video hardware and support I7 3770K chip, and I think that would be good solution.

In more extensive testing of both 4 and 6 core system, I can find little or no advantage to extra 2 core utilization. I think Quad core makes best sense for investment of new platform at this time.

_chef_

As with your other w7 thread, what counts is the softwares used!!

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SubZero

I was demonstrated a configuration where person manually assigned cores to certain programs and they showed noticeable speed improvement and reduced jerky / laggy feeling with two or more complicated apps active at once.

It was impressive. I think I will look into it further. I was surprised. I had thought Windows 7 64 bit handled all multi-core functions efficiently.

debro

I understand that windows XP could apply "masks" to programs on a permanent basis with the use of a little program called imgcfg.
I'd expect similar capabilities in Windows 7/8.

I recall thief 1, 2 or 3 needed these to work properly in XP.

Windows 7 doesn't handle additional cores ... efficiently. It just handles them better than XP Windows 8 appears to handle multi-core better than windows 7 .... but it has Metro

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SubZero

I have found in testing that Intel HyperThread does not produce the same as true physical core.

I would think 8 core AMD would be good for some things, like virtual machine, and is good value.

But for performance, Intel always seems to be winning.

debro

Intel hyper-threading, while detected as a separate core by windows, only increases the efficiency of the real core, from 90 % to about 95%, so basically you're getting about a 10-15% increase in performance of that core, so basically, if you see 4 cores on a hyperthreaded CPU, what you actually have is a 2 core CPU, with 2x fake cores providing a 10-15% bonus performance (compared to non-HT) Cpu's.

Please confirm the above figures via a hardware testing site.

I recall that in the last few years, AMD increased the effectiveness of their hit/miss algorithms & the efficiency of their interconnects in comparison to intel cpu's, but intel dodged those issues by introducing hyper-threading, which basically works as:
When current process requests data from cache, but data isn't in cache aka "miss" that process gets pushed off the cpu core while waiting for data to be retrieved, and the waiting hyper-threaded process takes over that CPU core .. until it receives a "miss", and then so-on and so forth.

With hyper-threading, Intel has practically resolved the delay associated with fetching data from slow caches/slow RAM/Slow HDD down to almost zero.

I don't believe AMD has anything similar to hyper-threading implemented on their CPU's ... and would probably be subject to all sorts of legal action by intel if they introduced it.

AMD CPU's are typically lower processing capability because they're hamstrung by their fabrication plant partners, which can't keep up with the reduced size of Intels technology fabrication plants, and so AMD CPU's require more power, which generates more heat and thereby AMD can't clock them as high as they want & etc/etc.

My understanding (as of about 1 yr ago) was that AMD CPU's are technically a more logically efficient design than intel cpu's, but practically AMD just can't manufacture them.

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SubZero

I find Intel 4 core and 6 core to work better than AMD 8 core or AMD 4 core.

Based on watching built in chip turbo modes, very seldom is more than 2 cores used most of time. If those monitors are reliable on the board.

debro

You'll need to provide context?

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