I've got an Athlon II 240 and often times when I suddenly open 5-10 new tabs in Chrome, both my CPU cores go to 100% and all my previously opened tabs freeze for some 10-20 seconds until the new pages load and render.
Now I'm in a dilemma. I can upgrade to a 6-core Thuban for about a $100, or buy the newest Haswell i5 with a new motherboard for about a $300.
My questions to you guys are:
- Did upgrading your CPU significantly speed up your browsing experience with Chrome?
- From which CPU to which did you upgrade?
- I'm interested to find out if I can (by a rough interpolation from your answers):
- How much speed up will more CPU cache bring to Chrome?
- How much speed up will more CPU cores bring to Chrome?
- How much speed up will going from an AMD CPU to an Intel CPU bring to Chrome?
Please note that I'm not interested in generic answers, like "it's better to have faster dual-core than slower quad-core", instead I want you to tell me about your individual experience with your particular CPUs while running many tabs in Chrome.
Also I don't believe much in benchmarks for Javascript or Chrome, I don't think they can accurately predict real user experience, but if you've got arguments to the contrary I'd like to hear them.
A couple more details:
- I've got 16 gigs of RAM and I have turned off the paging file, so I don't have a bottleneck with the hard disk and don't need a SSD.
- I've got 4 monitors, two on an integraded HD4250 and two on a Quadro NVS 290, these are not powerful GPUs, so I'm not sure if they're a bottleneck when browsing.