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How much SPEED do I really NEED?

N

Nearsite

Gawd
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
965
Ok, so I pose this question on here to get everyone's two cent's on how much CPU power I truly need? I'm currently running an E6300 @2.2ghz with the 2 Gigs RAM at 640mhz (4-4-4--12) and 7900GS

For the most part this is what I'm doing:

World of Warcraft
Company of Heroes
Oblivion
Dawn of War
Burning DVD's with Nero
Using DVD Shrink to rip movies
Surfing the Web

Should I just go back to Stock speed and lessen my temps? (Currently at 43 Idle Vcore, 35 NB)
 
It really should be obvious that only you can know how much speed you "need". You haven't even said what your needs are, and if you knew what your needs are you shouldn't even be asking that question.
 
If it were obvious to me, I wouldn't be posting here.....=)

My 'need' is to know how much CPU power I'm wasting doing the things I listed above @2.20ghz as opposed to 1.86ghz (or whatever stock ghz the E6300 comes in).

Will I notice any sort of difference doing anything I listed at stock and at OC?

Isn't the H all about 'real world performance' ? Will I notice any difference at all between the two speeds in a 'real world' setting?
 
Well then what are your needs? Do you want your games to be 60+ fps? Do you want windows to load in under X seconds? An app that finishes what its suppose to do in 10min vs 15min?

edit:
Will I notice any difference at all between the two speeds in a 'real world' setting?
Click to expand...

Yeah, you probably will notice a difference with CPU intensive programs like games, but you should be overclocking to 3GHz+ to really get the most benefit out of your CPU.
 
I want to know if I will notice any difference running at the two different speeds? I honestly don't think I'll notice if WoW is running at 55fps or 60fps or if DVD Shrink rips a movie in 5:59 vs. 5:45.

Are you saying Windows XP will load noticeably faster at 1.86 vs. 2.2?

Do I really need to be at 2.2ghz to surf the web? Will my pages load faster?

Again, my 'need' is to know if there is any real world difference between the two speeds that I will notice.
 
Here is my list of what I do. Dont' think any of those are CPU intensive. I'm not running Prime or Orthos everyday for fun.

World of Warcraft
Company of Heroes
Oblivion
Dawn of War
Burning DVD's with Nero
Using DVD Shrink to rip movies
Surfing the Web
 
Nearsite said:
Here is my list of what I do. Dont' think any of those are CPU intensive. I'm not running Prime or Orthos everyday for fun.

World of Warcraft
Company of Heroes
Oblivion
Dawn of War
Burning DVD's with Nero
Using DVD Shrink to rip movies
Surfing the Web
Click to expand...

WoW, Company of Heroes, and Oblivion can be extemely CPU intensive depending on what resolution you run them at.

But for general windows crap, and the occassional cd burn isn't going to make much a difference.
 
The faster the better. I'm not really that into overclocking, but I was able to get my e6300 up to 2.8GHz extremely easily. These chips are literally begging to be overclocked.
 
Well I guess I mainly want to conserve power becuase I leave my PC on 24/7 downloading things. I guess if my Vcore and Ram voltage are the same for both speeds, then is it using more power to run at a higher speed at the same voltage?
 
If you're concerned about the speed difference, is depends on what your doing.

In most games situations you're going to be gpu limited if you have eye candy turned up.
In cpu only intesive tasks, such as dvd encoding, you will see a very well scaled increase in those tasks. So if you overclock by 50%, you're likely to see a near 50% increase in speed on things like the high quality multi pass encoding. Still there is a little limitation of your HD speed and that will affect performance as well, so you dont get a true 50% speed inscrease.

As for going to 2.8ghz from your current 2.2, there is only about 20 more watts of poewr used and thats only while both cores are being stressed to the max, like dual prime 95. In most taks, the cpu is not utilized like this, so its still just a few more watts than your using now. I'd say its worth the increase, especially if you can use stock voltage, which you more than likely can up to 3ghz or more.
 
si0dine said:
WoW, Company of Heroes, and Oblivion can be extemely CPU intensive depending on what resolution you run them at.

But for general windows crap, and the occassional cd burn isn't going to make much a difference.
Click to expand...

What he said. WoW is immensely cpu/ram intensive, as is Oblivion to a point, tho oblivion is more gpu-bound than anything. I'm personally ordering an E6400 with similarish activities in mind; even if you don't OC now, 2 years from now you may want to in a fewish when performance starts to drop off. The extra $40 for a 6400 is very worth it I'd say.
 
Alright, so in conclusion, based on everyone's posts, it'll only use a few more watts of power to OC my E6300 and I should leave it at its current 2.2ghz or try to go even higher as it will only use a little more power. Correct me if I'm wrong!
 
Core 2's are very energy efficient. Mine even when OC'd to 3Ghz runs very cool, unless I torture test it with Orthos/Prime. But the 99% of the other time its not under 100% load its runs SUPER COOL.

Personally, I think you should overclock it to 2.8Ghz, assuming your ram can handle ddr2 800 speeds. But if its at 4-4-4-12 @ 640, it should handle ddr2 8000 (maybe at looser timings like 5-5-5-15). But the faster fsb/ram speed will easily offset the looser timings. AND your 28% faster CPU speed will equal nearly a 28% improvement in most things!!

7x400, nice round #.
 
Nearsite said:
Here is my list of what I do. Dont' think any of those are CPU intensive. I'm not running Prime or Orthos everyday for fun.

World of Warcraft
Company of Heroes
Oblivion
Dawn of War
Burning DVD's with Nero
Using DVD Shrink to rip movies
Surfing the Web
Click to expand...

DVD Shrink isn't very CPU intensive if you are just ripping movies, but aren't you encoding("shrinking") them too? If so, DVD Shrink is incredibly CPU intensive and dual-threaded to boot.

I notice a HUGE improvement when I went dual core, so I'm sure speed bumps will help considerably. Besides, with all the new protection measures, DVD Shrink is of limited use for ripping current movies by itself.

Ripit4me is where it's at. :D
 
Nearsite said:
Alright, so in conclusion, based on everyone's posts, it'll only use a few more watts of power to OC my E6300 and I should leave it at its current 2.2ghz or try to go even higher as it will only use a little more power. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Click to expand...

You should definitely go higher, 2.8-3.2GHz. Why wouldn't you try to get the most for your money?
 
Nearsite said:
Alright, so in conclusion, based on everyone's posts, it'll only use a few more watts of power to OC my E6300 and I should leave it at its current 2.2ghz or try to go even higher as it will only use a little more power. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Click to expand...
I think you should be more observant of CPU temperatures, if being overclocked sends the temperature up close to 60 degrees under load there may be a problem. I'd say, overclock as much as possible while still retaining good temps. If you intend to run your computer 24/7 then idle-temperatures is what you should look at.
There's really no good reason to run your E6300 on stock speed (unless electricity where you live is REALLY expensive), and if you are running at stock voltage you are probably already burning too many watts.
 
Darknyt said:
DVD Shrink isn't very CPU intensive if you are just ripping movies, but aren't you encoding("shrinking") them too? If so, DVD Shrink is incredibly CPU intensive and dual-threaded to boot.

I notice a HUGE improvement when I went dual core, so I'm sure speed bumps will help considerably. Besides, with all the new protection measures, DVD Shrink is of limited use for ripping current movies by itself.

Ripit4me is where it's at. :D
Click to expand...

This person speaks the truth. If you're recoding movies the more GHz, the better.
 
I'm undervolted to 1.18 and currently running 2.38ghz (I just went home for lunch and adjusted) Ram is at 680mhz. I thinnk i"m just going to make it go to 2.5ghz as it idles around 43C and 36C (Vcore and NB) according to CoreTemp.
 
I'd push it as high as it will go with stock voltage and leave it at that. Undervolting won't save you much power, and I can't imagine you'd save that much on heat.
 
Yeah, the difference between running at 1.8ghz and 2.8ghz is probably ~20watts... That's, well, 1/3 of a standard lightbulb...
 
In my opinion, the faster the better. Aim for one step ahead of what you can afford.

If you're like me and use your PC for more then 5 or 6 hours a day, thats more then you use anything else.

Also, if you just satisfy yourself with what you have now, in 2 or 3 years your PC is going to be outdated a lot. If you always aim for something relatively fast, in 2 or 3 years you won't refer to your computer as a POS.

At least that's been my philosophy.
 
Out of curiosity, what games have you guys noticed actually benefit from overclocking the CPU? I got a 1900xt...

In Call of Duty 2, I see no difference in average frame right (always around 50) at either my highest stable clock I've been to at 3.4ghz or stock E6400 speeds.

Battlefield 2 - forget it, it's already 100FPS!

Oblivion - I think there was 5-10fps improvement at high clocks, that helps in Oblivion for sure.

MP3 and movie encoding - or compressing lots of files, a world of difference. I think at stock speeds it took about 45 minutes for Nero to recode 5 episodes of a tv show (50 mins long) to DVD format, when I did another season overclocked, it only took 30...
 
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