So, I'm going to upgrade soon and I have been thinking. Is there much point in getting dual core for me, personally. The choice is either a 4400 or an Opteron 175 (if I can find one) or an Athlon 3800/4000 Opteron 148/150. The thing is I'm struggling with my budget. It totals £1650 without delivery and I only have £1600 to spend, so I ask this: With dual monitors where I occasionally run Football Manager while playing a movie on the other monitor, could one of the mentioned single cores cope with this? And how much difference is there between the 4400/175 and the single cores? [edit] I'm also going to be playing many games on just one monitor, such as Source games, FEAR, BF2, UT2k7 etc.
To save money you could Easily buy a 4200/3800 X2 and overclock it to 4800 X2 speeds and above, most 3800's hit 2.5Ghz and they're cheaper, have a high max temp (63C vs 55C). Hope this helps
I was thinking of getting a 150 and trying for 2.8+ Would this give me much of a performance increase in games (bearing in mind I'm hoping to get a 512MB GTX) and considering my 2800 Barton can sort of cope with playing FM and a movie, would the 150 be able to cope relatively easily. I think that is the most multi-tasking I'm going to do. (Watching a movie on one monitor and generally bumming around on the other monitor - forums msn etc)
Yeah the 150 would be a good chioce but you have to find a decent spetting one. eBay is al ways a good place to find Opties I've noticed, I've seen a fe wsingle opties hit 3Ghz. Also I think you should go for a 160 + really that way you'll have a decent multiplier and wont have to worry about your mobo FSB being the bottleneck
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/cpu/presler/charts/quake4-2.png Lots of new games are multithreaded - a 4800+ at 2.2GHz outpaces an FX at 2.8 in supporting titles.
With that evidence, I suppose I'm going to have to get dual core. And it looks like its going to be a 4200 to OC. I don't think I can afford the 4400.
click the link, take note of the word 'multithreaded' and go look at hte thread where pookey is talking about dumping his fx57 for a dual core
I would say the x2 3800+ is better value for money than the 4200+ £60 more for 200Mhz is not worth it imho especially when they will clock to around the same
Can anyone else back this up. Its what I thought, and if so I save an extra £60 and might even be able to get a WaveMaster instead of a Cavalier 3, and possibly specially order an A8N32 [by itself] when scan apparently gets some in tomorrow.
I'm just running some quake 4 numbers on a 7800 GT using 78.03 drivers at 1280x1024 0xAA 4xAF HQ: there's a bug in Release 80 drivers, where the NVIDIA dual core optimisations interfere with the dual core optimisations in Quake 4 - you'll see a slight performance drop if you use release 80 drivers and r_useSMP 1 with any 8x.xx drivers. X2 4800+ - 123.3fps X2 4400+ - 116.9fps A64 FX-55 - 116.6fps A64 4000+ - 111.3fps A64 3700+ - 109.5fps
Thanks, are you saying the dual core is not working as it should with these drivers and results? I guess much depends on how you see things, but to me it looks like the dual core makes little difference at the res. most people use, at least for the time being anyway.
It doesn't make any difference when you're GPU limited, much like any game, really speaking. FEAR benchmarks at 1280x960 0xAA 0xAF max details, no Soft Shadows are all in the region of 63-64fps for those CPUs. The thing is, the single core CPUs suck as soon as you start to do more than one thing at once (I'm a killer for that and I hate waiting for one task to complete before starting the next).
Yes for non gaming if you're a power user a dual core maybe worth it and it is the way its going to go anyway, its just a little misleading when benchmarks are shown at lowish resulations and then people claim a 50% increase in frame rate which I have seen on other forums I'm not saying I'm right, it's just as I see it I have had a few Dual CPU set-ups over the years and when using the right software they were very quick, the problem was that the Dual mother boards always lagged behind the times so you were always being held back by something else. With this lastest Dual core thing you have the best of both worlds..........I better get saving
Yeah, we try and provide both so that you can see how fast the CPUs are in CPU limited situations and also how fast they are in a more realistic situation too. 640x480 minimum detail in Q4 provides some interesting numbers.... X2 4800+ - 207.1fps X2 4400+ - 194.6fps A64 FX-55 - 143.8fps A64 4000+ - 133.8fps A64 3700+ - 119.7fps
I thought my ears were burning As hamish says... I'm a convert... I'm going dual core. I always did maintain even when planning this rig, that as soon as games appear (real ones, not vapourware) that are threaded, then I'll Ebay it and go dual core. We now have threaded games planned, and patches for current ones, so I'm struggling to justify keeping the FX when I can still get a good price for it. I'm waiting until Jan 10th however, and see what AMD pull out of the hat. I'd like a look at the FX60 and X2 5000 before I get excited. In all likelyhood, I'll be going for the FX60 if it's all it's cracked up to be. Go dual core mate! Games are out to support it... it's the beginning of the end for single core chips I think.
