Thanks for the info. You told just what I needed to know.

Adolfo
///

PS: Please, no Spam

Hello Adolfo,
I’m glad you found the information useful.
Regards, Ron

Thank you for the info!

At least I know that I can use the QX6700 to its full extent on XP Professional.

Hi Guia,
You are welcome. Glad the info. helped.
Ron

This hit it on the button.
I was looking at either a dual core or quad core but didn’t know if I’d be wasting money on the quad (and since that’s a 700$ difference at the procs I’m looking at, it’s a big deal).

Quad core here I come!

BTW, thx.

Hi Spellman,
All the best with your quad.

I actually have Vista Ultimate on my Q6600 (quadcore) PC. It was there on default. But when I insert my good old WinXP Pro SP2 Disc, It does not want em to install it, neither check the compatibility. What should I do ?

By the way. Thanks, I was sure quad-cores qere not compatible with XP! My PC is gonna be so fast!

Hello Alexandre,
The normal way is to install Vista after XP to take advantage of Vista’s boot menu. Also if you install XP after Vista, Vista will not boot up. There are work arounds to this.

Read hear:

http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=607987

And a BCEDIT program here:

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

I’d do a Google and make sure you completely understand the risks of trying this. I’m dual booting XP/Vista but each OS is on a separate drive.

Good luck in your venture.

Connie…

\”…There are many more ways in which you can lose all of the personal data that is stored on your computer…\”…

thank you! chery-o

Cheers for that, settled a debate i had with a mate in about 30 seconds by finding your page in the first couple of page hits on google. p.s. i was right

Mike.

Hello Micheal,
Cheers to you as well.

dear Ron,
i am very confusing of Processor Quad Q6600 .will this processor is compatible with window xp pro . i am a grahic designer and i need a good cpu with windows xp pro because all my application work well with windows xp .can you pls advise me .thks

Hello ritesh,
According to everything I have read it should work just fine.

Here is what I would do. I would confirm this with the company you purchase the chip from. Also confirm that if for some reason the quad doesn’t work correctly with XP Pro, that you can return it with a non-restocking fee and for a full refund.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Ron,

This answered my question about 30 seconds

Regards,
Adam

hi there,
i am looking at purchasing a workstation with 2 separate CPUs. it currently comes with redhat linux as the OS, but i would like to upgrade to vista. do you know which versions of vista have support for 2 separate CPUs? ie will premium suffice or do i need to go ultimate?
cheers

Hello Peter - you’ll need Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate to take advantage of both CPUs. Hope this helps.

thats great, thanks for the info. saves me buying vista premium and taking it back. if i were to go with XP does Pro support separate cpus?
cheers

Hi Peter,
XP Pro supports 2.

hi ron,
thanks for all your help and quick replies. went and bought the system tonight, cant wait for it to arrive..
cheers

You all have been slightly mislead by what Ron said. Seriously, no offence Ron, but i think you’re leaving out some vital information. Yes, it is no trouble to run xp pro on a quad core. I have a 6700 2.66 quad but xp only takes advantage of about 40% of multi-core processors. This is still pretty good, but you can’t think of ur multi-core as one large chunk. that is the reason ppl buy the 6600 or higher, becuase the average dual-core you would get in a crappy dell computer would be under 2 ghz. HOWEVER… there is a new update (beta already released) for xp…hence ”SP3” check it out becuase this update will be able to take full advantage of your multi-core processors. … i almost bought vista ultimate for 64bit…you know take it to the max but it still has so many problems…

Hello brandon t,
Thanks for the info.

I run 2x quad core xeons on a win xp pro, and it runs smoothly, and according to the task manager, it do not use more than 0-2 % whatever I do, no matter if I play a game, or write something.

Add the 16 gigs of ram
And a 9600 GT nvidia graphics card

Hello Tech,
Thanks for the information.

No problem, but to use 2x quad cores you will most likely need a serverboard

More physical processors and less dies per processor are generally able to be more efficient for a number of reasons, but more expensive and wasteful of power, and typically are biased towards server implementations and opteron.

The more-cores-approach - they can have more cache per core, and in the case of the Opteron, they have more memory controllers per core.

Its a matter of memory starvation, memory locking, caching and memory latency/bandwidth.

On the opteron, now struggling in raw performance per die, scales nicely because for every die you have a dedicated memory controller and the advantage of local memory in a NUMA system.

Intel implements a shared cache for every 2 CPUs, even on quad core, so a 12MB cache quad core is two 6MBs, 6MB shared for 2 CPUs.

AMD implements a cache per core regardless, but its a lot smaller. This isnt a good thing.

Now, the intel, not having a memory controller per physical chip, has a shared memory FSB. So if you take a dual socket system, and put 8 cores in there (2 quad cores), you’ll have a really find system with massive memory starvation, as you get the dual channel/interleave but you go through the intel MCH to get to memory, so thats 8 CPUs lining up behing one MCH. The reason for the giant intel caches.

However, intel with the MCH, can get to new memory technologies a lot faster than AMD since its only changing the MCH and not the CPU.

In “real world/officemark” or gaming benchmarks, it is unlikely that you would see the benefit to using two dual cores vs one quad core. On the intel side it may not matter at all since the cache size per 2 cores can be made the same and there is still one MCH per two sockets.

Id get a single quad core and rejoice in the simplicity.

Hello Mick,
Thanks for the information.

Hi everyone
I’ve got a little question; i ordered a new PC without an operating System. The CPU is a Core 2 Quad Q6600.
I want to install an old windows xp home edition on it.
As you wrote, one Processor with 4 Cores on it should fit with the XP-Home edition.
But i fear now to get troubles if i try to install the old home edition (sp1 is on it) on my new PC.
Did you ever heard of Errors that may Occur doing this? (maybe also with the drivers)
Sorry if I miss the topic, but it looks like you are very experienced

Greetings David

Well everything I read was very interesting. I have an opinion on this subject. I do happen to agree with Mick Russom. However, there is one flaw in his thought. He said “In “real world/officemark” or gaming benchmarks, it is unlikely that you would see the benefit to using two dual cores vs one quad core.” However, he kind of concatenated both the real world and office work together. Well in the real world there are professions that would max out 2 quad core CPUs (i.e. movie editing, graphic design, number crunching, web services, etc.)

The point I am going to make is that, you would be a fool to not buy a dual socket motherboard and run/possibly run 2 quad core processors. In todays society American programmers have taken a turn for the worst. The typical mind set is hard drive space and ram are plentiful and cheap. So programmers continue to write code to be less efficient and ultimately the programs by default end up being bigger and take longer to load (i.e: Adobe illustrator, to utilize Vista Ultimate to its full potential). If you look at software applications over the past few decades you would notice the increase in size. Software was once stored on floppy’s then CD, now I am getting software that is on DVD. Its a only another 5-10 years before the first application is sent out on Blue Ray discs. I mean I bought a game that came on 3 DVDs. Imagine the computing power one needs for that. Thus why I am now rebuilding my PC with a 2 socket motherboard with quad core in each socket.

So finally to my point. I am not sure about you guys, but I like to spend my time at the gym, with friends, or more importantly going out on dates. What I hate doing is rebuilding my PC because its behind the times. Well a system with dual sockets with 4 cores in each socket. Umm yea, it’s going to be a long time before I will need to upgrade again. Not only that, technology on processors is beginning to plateau and we may go another 5 years before another major technological break through is made.

–peace