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slower quad core or faster dual core


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i'm building a pc for my father and i have a athlonII x4 620 2.6 and i have a phenomII x2 550 or 545 i cant remember but i think its 3.0 

 

i have an asus m4a78lt mobo 8gb ocz ram

 

gtx 660 which i know is overkill

 

and a pny 120gb ssd my father has always had a slow pc im planning to blow his mind with how snappy this pc will be

 

my question is the athlon or phenom, 

 

he uses powerpoint, word, excel and basic web browsing

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quad core would be better . it doesn't really matter since it's just basic work computer . that ssd will be a nice boost if you have anti-virus software , otherwise 1 minute boot time vs 15 second isn't much of a problem .

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thats what i was thinking was go with the quad, this is mostly folding farm leftovers i'm considering digging out a 965 or 1055, from back when i thought cpu folding was worth it, but still leaning towards the x4 athlon

 

 

ive gotten past the denial stage and now i know im an am3 fanboy

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Those Athlons are beast! Use the quad!

Not as fast as the Phenom if he can unlock it to 3 or 4 cores, also the phenon will oc higher, had my old phenom2 550 running at 3.7 ghz 24/7 for 3 years and now it's in wife's pc doing the same.

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Generally, slower quad > faster dual due to multi-tasking. You would want the faster dual (and depends on how much faster), if your dad was working with a specific application that he wanted to get something done faster, and it wasn't fully optimized for multi-threading. Some applications were optimized for just a single core, but nowadays, it's 2 cores, or 4 cores, or sometimes all cores.

 

For example, Excel utilizes multi-threading, but some operations aren't, like sorting (uses a single core). Anyways, I would just recommend the quad core over the dual core anyway. You could always set Excel to run at most, 2 cores for all operations, then have 2 cores used for all other applications for multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is the key word. If you had a single core, and it was tasked with something, you wouldn't be able to do anything else until that task was finished. With more cores, you can work on other things while the first task was still running (as long as it wasn't utilizing all the cores).

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quad it is, got the machine all built, loaded windows, office, and a few other things, pops got on the internet first thing and it fell on its face and crashed. failed memtest after about a minute, lol nothing like talking dad into a new computer, then talking him into me building it just for it to fail.

 

He said well at least it turns on quick

 

i have my old mushkin sticks i had after occ and kingston hooked me up 

 

 

 

i was going to try to unlock the phenom but i decided not to because i didnt want instabilities, but i got them anyways

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quad it is, got the machine all built, loaded windows, office, and a few other things, pops got on the internet first thing and it fell on its face and crashed. failed memtest after about a minute, lol nothing like talking dad into a new computer, then talking him into me building it just for it to fail.

 

He said well at least it turns on quick

 

i have my old mushkin sticks i had after occ and kingston hooked me up 

 

 

 

i was going to try to unlock the phenom but i decided not to because i didnt want instabilities, but i got them anyways

RMA the bad RAM!

 

Also, did you try unlocking the phenom?

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