sniper007 said:
I dont buy the whole conroe thing either tbh. In fact dual core also I didnt bother upgrading. I played CS:S on a conroe system and then again on my opteron rig with same card... Absolutely **** all difference.
Personally I cant ever think of a time when I would want/need to be burning with nero, downloading, running a million apps, folding, gaming bla bla bla. And this whole benchmark thing. I have had memory that gives mem test errors that has been stable in a gaming rig for over a year. I have had prime/occt etc fail and claim instability when a rig has been fine etc. Benchmarks only tell half the story, and people who buy into the new hardware are always going to point out the benchmarks where it does perform.
Thats true for now, definitely; depends how you use the computer. However, the next batch of games are multithreaded, resulting in massive increases in performance simply because the CPU is used a lot more. Traditionally, since 3D accelerators, the GPU has had the heaviest load by far. Now the load is starting to even out with AI and physics becoming significantly more detailed. Better still it allows for parallel asset loading, so no more loading screens once in the game! It just streams content in the background, wonderful, wonderful use of multiple processors.
Of course quadcore will be out by the time multithreaded games come in force this christmas / early next year
Oh yeah - Prime failing is a certificate of instability. 'Fine' is very much relative. I've had people claim their computer is super-stable only to use it and find lag, crashes, and all sorts of nasties. 'Oh its always done that', or 'thats the first time thats happened'. Its one of those human things - you like the performance and it doesn't happen *that* often, so you just forget/ignore the occasional blips. You'll also find a lot of people who are very into a specific brand will never report anything problematic they've had with the hardware - never. Personally I like the HardOCP stress test since its much more realistic. They run multiple different applications in a loop for 24hrs - all at the same time. Almost any computer, unstable or no, can run a single application for 24 hours. However, the computer really does have to be stable to run the HOCP stress test. I have an AMD system that my nephews use, standard 'stress tests' will run for days on end, however leave it in their hands for a few hours and it'll lock up or crash. Not neccesarily a bad mark for AMD, more likely a bad mark for the VIA chipset
