Which of those would generally be considered better ?
I cannot decide whether the benifits of the dual core outweigh the speed of the single core ?
Any thoughts ?
There isnt a definitive answer. It depends entirely on what youre doing.
Im definately a multi-tasker, so I know that the dual core will be of benifit. I am just unsure as to whether the effects of the dual core will be lost on me due to the reduced CPU speeds on the cores.
If I unrar 2 large archives on the 3.2 its quicker to do them in series. I assume that if I have the dual core, I will be able to unrar them both in parallel and hence complete the job is less time than doing them linearly ?
Given the choice for a desktop (mainly work, occasional gaming) which would you opt for ?
Well, given the scenario youve given there:
The latest version of WinRAR supports multithreading. There is something like a 25% increase in speed when compressing archives but very little difference when decompressing as that is mainly bottlenecked by the hard drive youre decompressing it onto. Going dual core wont help you much there.
The main benefit you will probably see is that when a process gets locked and sucks up all of the CPU time, it doesnt lock the system out as there is another core ready and available to kill the process quickly. You should be able to multitask a little more effectively, especially if one of the tasks youre doing is particularly CPU intensive. For example, I never used to be able to play Civ4 on one of my screens and have Media Centre open on the other displaying a TV picture. Now that Ive upgraded to a C2D, it works flawlessly.
Well i have a dual core 2.66 oc to 3ghz straight out the box and it benchs faster than a 3.2 and 3.4 at stock...........
Although when u get the 3.4 HT it loses its fight but not by much.
to rar a 5 gig dvd image takes around 100 minutes.
I got it setup today and went straight after 3.4 out of the box, it was fine and temps stayed under 45oC even when benching...
...problem I have though is that the mobo I have P5P800-VM appears to have a fault and as soon as I use either of the secondary channel RAM slots it falls over :(
So its going back *fingers crossed* the replacement will be ok ! I know the RAM ( 4 * 512mb Corsair XMS3700 ) is fine as it passes Memtests on a different mobo @ Dual Channel 400
So today has been a case of *yay* and *boo* :/