• 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

Anesthesia

Anesthesia

Anesthesia

Associate
Joined
5 Jan 2004
Posts
189
Location
Chepstow
Hi, a friend is gettin a new PC, he would like to know what are the advantages of dual core over single. I have been out of touch with PC technology for some months, as I'm sure you will all know, that equates to a lifetime when dealing with computers, so I have no idea what to tell him!
 
Not a lot at the moment!

If you do a lot of multitasking or have some software that is coded to take advantage of multi-core cpus then its probably worth the extra.

Multi-core is the future though, just the future is not quite here yet :)
 
Anything with heavy CPU loads- encoding, video conversion, that sort of thing. I'm not sure if applications have to be multi-threaded, but I've used some and both cores are being used, some 100% each if I want it to be, and it does seem really fast.

So if your single core is at 100% for long periods at single core will help a lot, or if you want the process done in faster time set high priority mode and it'll do it twice as fast as the single core.
 
squiffy said:
Anything with heavy CPU loads- encoding, video conversion, that sort of thing. I'm not sure if applications have to be multi-threaded, but I've used some and both cores are being used, some 100% each if I want it to be, and it does seem really fast.

So if your single core is at 100% for long periods at single core will help a lot, or if you want the process done in faster time set high priority mode and it'll do it twice as fast as the single core.
Click to expand...

So would I be right in thinking that if I run a programme that currently uses 100% CPU power of a sigle core chip, regardless as to what the programme is doing (always maxes out CPU) its a game anyway.
With a duel core I could run this programme twice and give a core from a duel core CPU a copy of the game each, so to speak and would not slow down.

Currently if I open more than one copy of this game the PC grinds to a halt :( I know that this game is not multi threaded though.

PS sorry for the semi thread invasion :o
 
Currently if I open more than one copy of this game the PC grinds to a halt I know that this game is not multi threaded though.
Click to expand...

Ideally you would run each game from seperate hard drives, and of course have dual monitor. In theory yes it should be better, but because I don't have dual monitor I can't answer your question.

However I was encoding WAV files to FLAC in the background to my second 320GB, and playing Oblivion on my primary 320GB and I noticed no slow down whatsoever. The previous week though I only had one drive, and it slowed down a hell of a lot (reading game and reading/writing wav/flac files was too much for one drive)
 
Actualy now I think about it, these games are run in windowed mode so you can only have one fully active at a time. You click one the other goes light blue and fps drops to virtualy zero.
So im guessing a x2 would'nt help me, still wont one though :D
Unless there is a way to have multiple active windows on a x2 chip :confused:
 
Drizmod said:
You can use one core to encode a video in the background and the other core to play games
Click to expand...


Actually Windows will use 50% of each core to do each, not one app=one core. As the total processing power is seen by windows and distributed out equally.
 
I upgraded to dual core recently and I'm still to notice any real difference, I use my PC for gaming and surfing/work, unless you're encoding I don't think it makes a lot of difference.
 
Bear in mind some of the new games are dual core aware now and can utilise two CPU's to some extent.

Squiffy: Erm about running the same game twice... Some games stop you even starting a second instance saying that it's already running and you can't run more than one instance.

Also even if you ran an instance on each core I don't think you can assign each game it's own graphics card even if you are running SLI or CrossFire. Thereby both games would share graphics processing and graphics and system memory as well. And you'd probably end up with some serious bottlenecking as a result.

Just out of interest how do you play two games at once :p
 
oceaness said:
BeJust out of interest how do you play two games at once :p
Click to expand...
Haha yeah :)

I believe some people play MMORPG's like this, i.e you could have two characters in a game, one a warrior and another a wizard, you get your wizard to cast some spells on your warrior say (then the Wiz goes stands somewhere safe), then alt+tab to your warrior and go smack everything up...sorta thing :p
 
I find dual core has advantages today.

A lot of games and apps (Nero 7, BF2) support multiple cores.

you dont get that waiting at an unresponsive dasktop after you turn it on, at all.

And if an app crashes it only runs 1 core up to 100%. And you can kill the process instead of having to reset.
 
Big.Wayne said:
Haha yeah :)

I believe some people play MMORPG's like this, i.e you could have two characters in a game, one a warrior and another a wizard, you get your wizard to cast some spells on your warrior say (then the Wiz goes stands somewhere safe), then alt+tab to your warrior and go smack everything up...sorta thing :p
Click to expand...

Thats pretty much it right there, but often you would have multiple instances open just to be selling stuff, not actualy playing. Problem with this is it pretty much kills the PC off for doing anything else and I wanna play company of heros while making some mmorpg money on the side :D
Was just wondering if duel core, in this instance would be of any benifit. Guess it could only help.
 
BigglesPiP said:
I find dual core has advantages today.

A lot of games and apps (Nero 7, BF2) support multiple cores.

you dont get that waiting at an unresponsive dasktop after you turn it on, at all.

And if an app crashes it only runs 1 core up to 100%. And you can kill the process instead of having to reset.
Click to expand...

Don't think BF2 supports dual core :confused:
 
I bought a HP pavillion to save myself putting a system together and to get a warranty

this system had the 3.2Ghz dualcore 940 in i believe. It was so poor i nearly cried, it got packed up and is going back on thursday, i got it on sunday so i still have a 7 day no quibble as it were...
 
BigglesPiP said:
Runs both my cores up to little peaks of 100% (both cores at once).

Oddly enough Speedstepping actually cuts in about 1/2 the time. I love this Conroe. :D
Click to expand...

Never seen BF2 use anything more than 50% CPU power on my rig. Other background processes could have course cause your CPU utilisation to go over 50%, but if you look at BF2 as a process rather than total CPU usage I'm sure you'll never see it go over 50%.

Dual core still has its advantages even in applications that don't use multithreading as while one core is handling the application the other is free to handle background tasks.

Hav
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom