OT: New Processor

[El_Phil]

Do you run alot of things in the background when running games? If you do then it will help a noticeable amount.

As in one processor runs the game, the other does the anti-virus, MP3 player, rips the CD and anything you do in the background.

On the other hand if you don't run much stuff then HT is probably enough as it will improve the multi-tasking.

Finally games are going to utilise dual core eventually, so it would be future proof and good for a few years. As I understand it in a couple of years your effective processor power is going to double when games can use both cores.

[AgentZero]

I do tend to have a few things running simultaneously, usually while playing MMOGs of some variety, during the downtime I'm often burning CDs or web browsing, etc. And since most games music tends not to suit my tastes, I almost always have an MP3 player running in the background. On the current machine, I usually run into a annoyingly noticeable delay when switching between programs. Would dual core help with that at all? And of course once games start taking advantage of dual cores, that'll be a bonus as well.

On the AMD side of things, I was looking at their website and I noticed the 'top' AMD processors, the FX-55 and the FX-57 seem to have dropped dual core technology. Does anyone know if they've done anything fancy to make up for this?

[Thermodyne]

As far as Intel is concerned, the P4 3.73 EE is the king of gaming systems. But, the fact that they don’t even have a new style model number would indicate that they are not long for this world. The dual core chips are the future, but not the ones on the shelf today. But since you prolly don’t want to wait on the new series, I’d go with a dual core EE for future proofing or a 3.73 EE if the future was now. The 3.73 EE has a faster FSB which is worth a lot with some games.


I can show you some real world bench results from a 3.73 EE if you’re interested.

[Thermodyne]

AgentZero said:
I do tend to have a few things running simultaneously, usually while playing MMOGs of some variety, during the downtime I'm often burning CDs or web browsing, etc. And since most games music tends not to suit my tastes, I almost always have an MP3 player running in the background. On the current machine, I usually run into a annoyingly noticeable delay when switching between programs. Would dual core help with that at all? And of course once games start taking advantage of dual cores, that'll be a bonus as well.

On the AMD side of things, I was looking at their website and I noticed the 'top' AMD processors, the FX-55 and the FX-57 seem to have dropped dual core technology. Does anyone know if they've done anything fancy to make up for this?

The FX series is unlocked, and intended for the OC'ing market. While the DC chips are mainstream. There is a performance hit for DC overhead, so a single core chip will out perform a DC chip of the same speed/core on most games. But AMD chips are not good multi-taskers, and the DC chips fix this.

[AgentZero]

Hmmm... Looks like I'll be going for the 3.2GHz DC in that case. The EE is about 400eur more expensive and it doesn't sound like it'll make much of a difference for the amount I'll have to pay. Thanks guys, & once everything's finalized I'll post the specs for my new rig for y'all to drool over.

[Fyron]

El_Phil said:
As in one processor runs the game, the other does the anti-virus, MP3 player, rips the CD and anything you do in the background.

Unless you have a horribly innefficient AV program (Kaspersky only uses more than 0% CPU in taskman when it is doing a full system scan, which can be done at night when not using the PC anyways), CD ripping is the only process there that is even marginally processor intensive. IM programs, MP3 players, etc. tend to use very few resources, so will not benefit tremendously from dual cores. Unless they are Trillian 3.x and you are viewing the contact list, of course... ugh.

El_Phil said:
Finally games are going to utilise dual core eventually, so it would be future proof and good for a few years. As I understand it in a couple of years your effective processor power is going to double when games can use both cores.

The problem being that you will be spending twice as much money now for a processor that really won't do much for you until a few years later when games might commonly be made as multithreaded applications.

400 euros more for dual core is most certainly not worth it. You will certainly be able to buy a good dual core processor in 2 years for less than that. "Future proofing" is only worth it when it doesn't more than double the price.