Gaming: dual-core or bust

[setter]

Just under £100.00 is about right for an E8400, Q9550's are going for £120.00 ono, of the games that i play only arma 2 seemed to show an improvement with a quad (q9550 3.8ghz) compared to my nephews similair clocked E8400 rig. A lot will still depend on vid card, ive noticed some drastic drops from my gtx 280 to the 8800gt, gaming at 1920x1200 doesnt help.

 

[Rroff]

I think Intel have got it right with the i3 atm, most games are still mainly dual core optimised, with 3rd/4th threads doing minor stuff.

Yes there are games that gain a good chunk of fps when used in conjunction with a quad, but what you will also find is that once you up the res, start adding effects, and AA etc. the GPU becomes the limiting factor, not the CPU, and as such the duals/tri's/quads all give very similar fps.

As such the i3 dual core with HT works a treat for these situations, while not pumping out the heat, or sucking up the juice a fully fledged quad does.

As for use in windows, I went from a Q9550 @ 3.6 to an i3 530 @ 4GHz and honestly couldn't tell the difference from within a windows environment, if you think you can then its pure placebo.

This is probably right - while there are a small handful of games that benefit performance wise from a quad core if your using a high end or multi GPU setup (ETQW for instance gets more than 30% FPS boost from quad over dual) - the big benefit with most that do support multithreading is the extra threads are used to keep things smooth - so you get less stutters, slowdown, etc. and often the load on the 2 extra cores is not that high.

Again with windows for a lot of tasks its just being able to thread those small things that makes a difference in smoothness when one app is very busy... unless your doing monster encoding type processing.

For gaming I don't think quads, etc. will get as used as they could have been as in future I'd imagine developers will start to shift quite a bit of the code that does get held back by serial processing onto the graphics card through CUDA, OpenCL and the likes.

 

[3t3P]

get a quad, makes you feel manly

 

[Marvin]

I know that this is 'only one game' but GTAIV is massively better with a quad. I had an E8400 at 4GHz, and it wasn't really playable, even with a 4890. I then got a 955BE at 3.7GHz, using an AM2 motherboard and the same DDR2 RAM, and got perhaps double minimum FPS, and 1.5x average FPS - much smoother. GTAIV is a console port - and a very poor one at that. As we end up with more console ports, chances are we'll get some more poor ports, that'll be CPU dependant.

My 5850 that I've just plugged in also made a nice difference in GTAIV too though... (Up to 55FPS (955 + 5850) from about 40FPS (955 + 4890) from about 25FPS (E8400 + 4890)).

 

[Taziir]

On my X2 [email protected] with a 4890 I get around 40fps and GTAIV is totally playable. When the chip is unlocked, no OC, I haven't noticed much difference in game, but it did yield an extra 5 - 10fps /shrug