• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Dual core/Single core does it matter?

gam3r

gam3r

gam3r

Soldato
Joined
20 Jun 2005
Posts
3,826
Location
London..
Im going to upgrade my PC in a few months, as i'm waiting to see what Conroe is going to offer with its dual core..

Now i would be using this PC just for gaming, bit of video encoding(divx to dvd) and web browsing/work. Looking at the deals of the week i see the AMD 3500(is it the venice core?) chip for under £90 which is rather tempting, but the burning question inside me is would it be better for me to get a dual core chip for gaming or single core chip, and does it make that much of a difference?

I would probably be willing to stretch the budget to a San Diego core but right now the 3500 on offer is very temping.

This is the system spec i had in mind:

AMD 3500+ AM2
2GB of some DDR2 ram
X1800/1900xt

How would it play games? Would it max most of todays games out or would i be CPU limited?


Im trying to so hard to wait until Conroe comes out i'm pulling my hair out :eek:
 
Well, you may want to wait and hold your horses from going to AM2 just yer until the get to 65nM manufacturing process early next year. One option would be to try and save yout cash till then.

But if you need to upgrade now, you may want to either choose a good 939 set-up or a better idea would be to get a good graphic card, and a n Optey processor and just overclock the hell outta it. That should give you enough power till next year.
 
Hiya, Thanks for the reply.

As you can see from my Siggy, my system specs don't let me play any of my games that i'd like to play properly, meaning i can't rally wait for the 65NM chips, i can only possibly wait for Conroe to come.

It doesn't help that my motherboard has gone all funny on me as my system randomly likes to lock up when doing anything or just sitting idle, so i need to upgrade in the next few months.

I was thinking, if i go for an AM2 setup it is sort of future proof ( i know no such thing exists), compared to 939 if you know what i mean so i'm not really sure about that tbh.
 
If getting a new cpu then dual core is the only way to go IMO.You will notice a massive gain in encoding too.

If yiu can wait for conroe then thats great if not get yourself a dual core opteron and run it at fx62 speeds like me :D
 
When you say dual core, do you mean SKT939 or AM2? I will wait to see what Conroe's offerings are in terms of gaming and general performance, not to forget pricing - although i have a feeling motherboards for this CPU will not be cheap..
 
gam3r said:
When you say dual core, do you mean SKT939 or AM2? I will wait to see what Conroe's offerings are in terms of gaming and general performance, not to forget pricing - although i have a feeling motherboards for this CPU will not be cheap..
Click to expand...


dual core is available on both platforms.
My opty is s939 as AM2 offers little performance gain over s939.
 
does dual core "work" in windows xp or xp 64? ?
i currently use xp64

my system
3800x2 @ 2.3
1gb 3200 XMS3200C2PT


friends system
3000+ @ 2.01
1gb 3200 value select

i ran super pie a an got 37 seconds and my friend got 41 seconds, not much of a difference since i have 2 cores at higher clock

i thought only vista used dual core properly

can someone explain plz

thx

joker
xx
 
super PI is not multi threaded so that fact that you have a dual core cpu will not make any difference.

Now encode a video file in a multi threaded encoder and you can see maybe your dual core doing the same job 50% faster.

Thats where dual core comes into its own!
 
I don't think i really want an opty, its either an X2 or a conroe but if the any single core chips can do the same job just as good as these too at games then i'd be happy...
 
Concorde Rules said:
Wait for Conroe.

Job done :p
Click to expand...

I have a feeling that the DDR2 ram and motherboard will rape me for all i've got :(

That San Diego 3700+ in Weekly offers is tempting me now...pure evil :mad:
 
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) - OEM (CP-150-AM) £99.95
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3 (GE2GB3200BDC) £104.95
Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 (Socket 939 & Upgradable to AM2) AGP & PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-002-AK) £36.95

Subtotal £241.85
VAT £42.33
Total £284.18

:(

Again, i think with conroe the motherboard and ram will be dear.. and we don't even know how it performs with games yet, just superPI really.
 
For gaming, I have yet to see any significant differences with dual-core over single core at the same rating - there is the odd game where an X2 3800+ might be a couple of frames per second faster than something like a 3700+ San Diego, but then there are too many other cases where it performs worse than a 3200+ venice. Quake 4 seems like the only game to offer any kind of worthwhile reasoning to use a dual-core CPU for gaming, so really, if you don't encode DVD's etc that often, and you want only gaming performance, something like the 3700+ you mentioned would be much better value for money.

The thing is, the end of July isn't that far away, and there will most likely be lots of price cuts according to one of the threads posted here, so I would just wait and see how the situation is then - I wouldn't want to miss out on cheapo prices when it only requires waiting a month and a bit.
 
I guess i can last for at most another month, see conroe's offerings and AMD's price cuts..;)

It's so hard trying to use a computer that freezes randomly :mad:
 
The bummer is waiting for July. When it comes, September will see the launch of AM3 or DDR3 on mobos!!!!!!
For now, I couldn't decide on Dual core either, so I went for the Tyan K8WE. Using 2 opterons (current 244's, 256's soon) single core 64's.

Is two seperate CPU's better than a single Dual core. ????????

Cos of this i also run 7800gtx in SLI. Overall i would like to compare the performances of all the 1.8 speed AMD's to see who's the daddy.

As of today though, 2 x Opt 256 and/or FX62 IMO..........
 
easyrider said:
super PI is not multi threaded so that fact that you have a dual core cpu will not make any difference.

Now encode a video file in a multi threaded encoder and you can see maybe your dual core doing the same job 50% faster.

Thats where dual core comes into its own!
Click to expand...

Is nero express a multi threaded encoder? if not do you know which ones are?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom