AMD 550 BE questions

[lee20010]

A member of the forum (Dandaman) has kindly offered to lend me a AMD 550 Black edition to tie me over till I buy my i5 or i7, he said that one core cannot be overclocked (some issue with it) however all four cores work at stock.

MY question is, what would be faster. 3 overclocked cores, or 4 stock cores?

 

[SeeKified]

Depends greatly on what you're using the processor for. In applications that aren't written for multithreading or simply don't do it very well, a higher clock speed would be more beneficial than having that last core (and this will likely be the case with most applications people use today). If you're doing something that can use all cores to their full potential (rendering, encoding/decoding) then having the fourth core active would make a huge difference.

 

[lee20010]

the main use would be gaming. my current processor holds my gfx card back. What would be better for gaming.

 

[lee20010]

Any idea?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A 3.1GHZ Phenom II X4 will be fine for most current games. My mate has a 2.9GHZ Phenom II X4 and it is fine for the games they play. My Q6600 at around 3GHZ is fine as is the Q9300 another mate has ATM.

 

[lee20010]

what type of games are you playing.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

what type of games are you playing.

With my overclocked Q6600 and an overclocked HD5850 1GB,I have played the following games recently at high settings at 1680X1050:
1.)Crysis2
2.)Metro2033
3.)DiRT2
4.)Fallout:New Vegas

With an overclocked HD4830 512MB,I could run the following games at high settings at 1440X900 and 1680X1050:
1.)Borderlands
2.)Mass Effect
3.)Mass Effect 2
4.)SupCom
5.)SupCom 2
6.)UT3
7.)L4D
8.)L4D2
9.)Fallout 3
10.)Crysis

My friends play a few of the previous games but also games like DragonAge,Civilization V,Sins of a Solar Empire and StarCraft II.

Crysis2 with the DX11 patch does tax my Q6600 but still I got decent framerates. The main issue is that probably due to the excessive tessalation used framerates would jump around a bit for a few seconds at the beginning of each level.

 

[lee20010]

that's very helpful thank you. So stick to 4 stock cores??

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

that's very helpful thank you. So stick to 4 stock cores??

In most cases I would do so. The only two games I would say on the list I mentioned which would do better on a higher clocked dual core are StarCraft II and Sins of a Solar Empire.

However,modern games like latest Deus Ex and BF3 tend to run better on quad cores.

 

[lee20010]

well it should come tomorrow so we'll see