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Any one gone from Quad core back to Dual core for gaming ?

jolie77

jolie77

jolie77

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26 Jan 2009
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I built a hole new PC for Empire total war and I have just found out it doesn't use quad core. I would have thought out of all the games that cried out for quad it was this game.

Any way I am considering selling my Q6600 @3.6Ghz and getting a E8600 and overclocking it on water to no doubt 4.5Ghz+.

It seems dual core if the way forward for games these days, with lazy game programmers
 
You won't see any significant performance increase/decrease. I would just keep the quad unless you are itching for something new to play with, and in that case I would grab an E0 Q9550
 
I have an E8600 at 4.4 running cool, I'm very impressed with the performance.
You would notice a nice performance boost over the Q6600

which video card(s) are you running?
 
jolie77 said:
I built a hole new PC for Empire total war and I have just found out it doesn't use quad core. I would have thought out of all the games that cried out for quad it was this game.

Any way I am considering selling my Q6600 @3.6Ghz and getting a E8600 and overclocking it on water to no doubt 4.5Ghz+.

It seems dual core if the way forward for games these days, with lazy game programmers
Click to expand...

I don't think it's that all game developers are lazy, I've read that it's actually quite difficult to code games using techniques such as hybrid threading, so that they use four cores as opposed to one or two, at the same time.

Also, if you look at the percentage of their target market that have four cores (like in the Steam hardware survey), it's not really worth it yet.
 
I did it last year. Had a Q6600 at 3.8Ghz but no games i had used all the cores so most of the time i had 2 or even 3 cores sitting at 3.8Ghz doing nothing but sucking up power and chucking out heat. Got rid of it for more than i paid and got a second hand E6600 SL9ZL for £65 which also clocked to 3.8Ghz. Kept that for a year until one of my mates me an offer i could'nt resist for the E6600/8800GT/2x1GB Crucial Ballistix pc2 8500 that i had and now i have my Wolfie. Have'nt missed the quad at all.

There is hardly any increase in performance past 3.6Ghz though. I have been doing a lot of benching to update my E5200 performance review and once past 3.6Ghz the gains get smaller and smaller in games.
 
Despite the fact that only like %2 of all pc games utilize more than 2 cores would seem like it would be pointless to have a quad, but I would also expect to see more and more games using four cores in the future. I personally have always been a gta fan. Though this is not my favorite gta, I bought a quad to run it because with my dual I was maxing out my cpu always. I'm sure someone will more than likely contradict my opinion that keep your quad is somewhat future proofing for games.
 
This question, in one form or another comes up often. Peeps always keep saying that "In the furure more and more games will utilise quads", well they've been around a long time now and virtually no one has utilised it in games. We will probably all be dead from old age before they do. We also get peeps saying that "duals arn't worth it because you don't see any increase in games for the higher clock", the same peeps will tell you in another thread that your GPU is being bottlenecked by your cpu.

In my experience, get a good GPU, get an E8600 and clock the nuts off it. Then watch your games fly, whilst others are chugging along at 3.6ghz waiting for non existant multi core games to come along.
 
kitfit1 said:
This question, in one form or another comes up often. Peeps always keep saying that "In the furure more and more games will utilise quads", well they've been around a long time now and virtually no one has utilised it in games. We will probably all be dead from old age before they do. We also get peeps saying that "duals arn't worth it because you don't see any increase in games for the higher clock", the same peeps will tell you in another thread that your GPU is being bottlenecked by your cpu.

In my experience, get a good GPU, get an E8600 and clock the nuts off it. Then watch your games fly, whilst others are chugging along at 3.6ghz waiting for non existant multi core games to come along.
Click to expand...

Lol tell that to those who have Core i7...and I happen to have a Q6600 and as far as I am concerned its the best move I ever made after my crappy Athlon X2 6000 couldnt handle my games and its a dual core...lol... :p
 
The reason your X2 6000 couldn't handle games is because it's crap, not because it's dual core. If you switched to an E6600 instead of a Q6600 you'd see the same gains in pretty much every game.
 
CK61938 said:
Lol tell that to those who have Core i7...and I happen to have a Q6600 and as far as I am concerned its the best move I ever made after my crappy Athlon X2 6000 couldnt handle my games and its a dual core...lol... :p
Click to expand...

As Gurusan has just said, if you had gone for a C2D the gains would have been the same. It would also have been a lot lot cheaper. Your games arn't suddenly using 4 cores because it's an i7 you know.
 
Well The only reason I think more games will start being made for more than 2 cores is because 360 and ps3 are upping their graphics and to compete with consoles systems pc game will probably become more elaborate as pc games are usually always better than their console versions.
 
I went from a Q6600 @ 3.6 >> E8500 @ 4.2 >> Q6600 @ 3.6

Why? because I really didn't noticed any benefit from the extra 600Mhz and tbh I'd rather have 2 extra cores than 600 spare MHz.
 
Quad+ is the way forward, anyone looking to keep their CPU for gaming for more than a year would be bonkers not to go at least quad.
 
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