OT: Building a new computer...

[AgentZero]

GuyOfDoom said:
I've been a fan of this case since I saw it:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129021

Fancy fan LEDs are all well & good in theory, but in practice they are the badness. Trying to sleep as your PC works on an overnight download while simultaneously lighting up your room like a cheap strip club is not fun.

Also, quad cores are useless.

[Randallw]

You don't say. I'm in the market for a new computer and I saw a quad core that the salesman explained had less Mhz than his old one but was 5 or 6 times as fast. I thought dual or quad core meant 2 or 4 times the Mhz but I have gotten conflicting information that it is the speed listed but having 2 or 4 cores makes it process faster.

[capnq]

As I understand it, multiple cores only give significant speedups for programs that were designed to exploit them.

[Randallw]

so is it worth it for a rig to play games in about 6 months?. Stuff like Spore or a MMPORPG. I would expect them to be designed for stuff like that.

[Raapys]

Quad Cores aren't completely useless. You will get a faster computer overall. However, few applications yet take advantage of all the cores. Photoshop and 3DStudioMax are programs that benefit enormously from quad core( or even more cores ). Upcoming games like Crysis, and all games being made with the UnrealEngine3.0( that's alot of games ), are designed to take advantage of 2 or more cores. The future is Quad Core, really. But with brand new Intel and AMD quad cores coming up within the next few months, there's little use buying the current quad cores on the market.

Especially interesting is the AMD quad core, since they've been sort of 'out of the loop' lately it will be interesting to see how theirs perform compared to Intel's.

[Randallw]

That's ok. I won't buy it till Christmas. I hope to save some money that way and I told my sister she could have my current computer when she does her internship.

[Renegade 13]

There's really no point going out and getting the latest, greatest thing, when you can go two or three hardware generations back and get a helluva lot better value:dollar ratio. Dual- and quad-core processors are all shiny and flashy now, but you really don't need them at all, and won't for some time.

[Fyron]

Quad core desktop CPUs will be good in maybe 3-4 years. Stay far away from them for now if most of your time is not spent rendering hugely complex 3d models.

I thought dual or quad core meant 2 or 4 times the Mhz but I have gotten conflicting information that it is the speed listed but having 2 or 4 cores makes it process faster.

Not exactly. 2 cores is like having two discrete CPUs, so instructions from two processes can be executed at the same time. Each core is necessarily slower than a CPU that used the same process tech, but used the whole core. The reason why multiple CPUs/cores tend to be better than a big single one is that most processes (even games) don't really need all of instruction processing capacity of the last generation of single-core CPUs. Its better to split up the silicon so that the OS task scheduler has more leeway to manage applications (such as kernel and background processes). In theory, 4 cores are better than 2, since the system can process instructions from more processes concurrently.

When you compare a dual core to a quad core CPU, both made on the same silicon process level (45 nm now for the latest stuff, IIRC), a dual core tends to come out ahead in real world applications for home use. Each core has twice as much capacity to process instructions as a quad core CPU. On the other hand, a quad core CPU can process instructions from twice as many applications at once. There are pros and cons for each situation. When you have a ton of concurrent processes (or threads of one big one) running all the time, you want as many CPUs as possible. Servers tend to benefit greatly, as do workstations that do a ton of data crunching (or model rendering if the renderer is capable of using many CPUs). When you have just one app that is very CPU intensive, its better to have a dual core CPU.

Games don't really lend themselves to many concurrent threads. There is a lot of optimization that can be done with 2 threads, but going to 3 or 4 is usually redundant, since the extra tasks that could be split off tend to be far less process-intensive than the main threads. Plus, multi-threading in games is still nascent; most devs are still trying to wrap their heads around two concurrent threads, much less many.

In summation, ignore quad-core CPUs for the next few years. Dual-core CPUs should net performance gains with modern games (and are more than sufficient to run older games). Quad-core CPUs should net performance losses with almost all existing games, and most games under development.

[Randallw]

Thanks, I'll remember to stick with dual core then and leave the quad stuff for the one after that then. Either that or keep an eye out to see if the games I'm after use quad stuff, though I see by your explanation that probably won't be.

About the only other thing I have running when I game is music. That and I don't bother closing internet windows. I have a couple of coasters though that taught me to close everything else when I burn DVDs.

I actually went into a new store and said I was after a top end system. The salesman, maybe after a big commision, pointed out to me a big quad core system. I said to him

"ok I said I wanted top end but I didn't mean that much"

he then pointed out the systems along the back wall.

[Raapys]

To my knowledge there's no real cons against quad core( except price, and bigger cooling and power requirements ) compared to dual core. Intel's quad core CPUs, the only quad cores available at the time, are simply two of their dual cores put together on one chip. Given the same clock frequency, a quad core and a dual core will perform equally in applications/games that only support one or two cores.

The catch here is, as mentioned, the price. The 3ghz dual core costs the same as the 2.4ghz quad core.

Personally I think it's only about a year or so before most( if not all) new games released will take some advantage of quad core, though.