With my last upgrade I jumped in raw Mhz by about a factor of 10... By that logic I won't upgrade untill you can get... oh, say a 16 core 8ghz chip.
Well I went from 1.7Ghz Single core to 2.2Ghz Dual Core to 2.5Ghz Quad core. Three cores is probably actually ideal for gaming because many games will use two threads leaving one thread free for background processes.
price - performance. whichever is the winner. and of course, if it's another platform, how much more to switch...
starting from scratch? probably the amd chip. if i already own a 775 socket mobo, e8400, or for that price range, e7400, or maybe the new e6300...heck, i doubt there's much performance difference between the e6300 and the 720 to warrant the extra $30 for the cpu.
I'm building a little shuttle pc for gaming at lans as my desktop is too large and heavy (Core i7 watercooled Cosmos S) and I got myself a little Phenom II X3 720 for £90 (special offer at the time). It runs fine for what I throw at it, and isn't all that hot either. I've used C2D, C2Q and i7, Athlons, Phenoms etc. All have their place depending on what you are doing. A triple core 720 is a fine little chip.
I would go for a E8400 because of the platform and if want performance intel rig is better(my opinon) than the amd, but for the bugdet I would go for the tri-core one.
Compared to the e8400 no doubt about it Although, would now buy a 550, as its just as good, and even cheaper I do have a 720 sitting on my desk waiting for a motherboard, I think it will wipe the floor with my e7300.
Depends if I was upgrading or building a new system. If I had a 775 system and was upgrading it, it wouldn't make much financial sense to build a whole new system around the 720. But if I was building a new system, I would absolutely go for the 720 over the E8400. The extra core makes up for the slight overclocking disparity - which seems to be a proportional disparity between the 720 and, say, the Q6600. Besides, in a Crossfire system, it's just good value for money. When compared with a Phenom II 940, a Q9550, and an i7 920 (in both stock and overclocked tests), Anandtech had this to say: - Diosjenin -
I have been thinking along time about this, if i was starting from scratch to build a gaming rig, i would have to build a full AMD/ATI machine, looking at prices Intel just aint close anymore. Buying anything right now, i would definatly look into a 720 BE with a half decent board, much cheaper than anything Intel can offer. AM3 boards dont break the bank like intels. Top end boards based around AM3 struggle to break £150, and thats super top end, meaning mid-range is £100 and that makes alot of sense for me, thats the days of NF7-S.
i don't see the point in them. dual cores don't have enough cores while quad cores are cheap enough. consider this: -what do you buy dual cores for: pure Mhz. so what's the point of not-so-fast tri-core here? -what do you buy quad cores for: multi-threaded encoding and games such as GTA4, so what's the point of crippled tri-core here?
Allowing the third core to handle background and system tasks so the other two are entirely free to handle the game/application at hand. ~50% price savings over a comparable quad-core. - Diosjenin -
GTA IV only uses 3 threads AFAIK (like the Xbox 360), so a tri-core is really the minimum requirement for playing it smoothly.
I have a 939 too. Yay! Here's an interesting article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multi-core-cpu,2280-10.html I think a Tri-core (710/720/705e?) is all I'd need for the next 4 years if I had one.
