CPU comparison

[#1]

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@chenks76 wrote:
so clock speed wins even though it's an older generation CPU ?

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Well the E6550 was a Conroe architecture which started in 2004 while the E5800 is from the Wolfdale architecture which start in 2005. So the E5800 is the newer one of two, released in 2010, 3 years after the E6550.

Just going by Intel names and numbers is very confusing as they keep giving different meanings to the names over time.

[#2]

Core 2 Duo is higher up the scale than Core Duo though?

[#3]

Sorry I didn't mean the system would be unused, I meant that the CPU would spend most of its time idling along. It is instructive to open task manager and look at the CPU performance graph on a desktop PC. Mine idles along at 5-10% utilisation most of the time - almost regardless of what I am doing. 

I can stress it if I find some CPU intensive work ( a complex Statistics analysis), but most of the time it is simply waiting for me, the hard drive, or the network to do our bit of the job.

[#4]

The higher clock speed of the E5800 should give you better performance. But as you have both systems, you could always benchmark them yourself with your application. Setup the resource monitor and verify which machine handles it best.

[#5]

This page probably gives you all the possible comparisons between the two CPUs, both theoretical and real-world. (TL,DR conclusion: The 5800 is arguably the 'better' of the two)

[#6]

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@chenks76 wrote:
so clock speed wins even though it's an older generation CPU ?

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For me yes I'd always go for clock speed unless the proccy has a low L1/2 cache which would hamper the speed of the proccy anyway. In that scenario I'd probably go for the chip with the higher cache.

In your scenario, given that the faster chip has half the cache and a slower bus speed to transfer data to / from the thing in the first place, I think I'd personally go with the slower chip purely because it has double the cache and a faster bus speed to support the chip operating but if you have them both sat there anyway, why not just try them both?

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