New CPU - should I wait?

[Johnny Girth]

As always it's the age old problem of should-I-wait-or-buy-now...

Got an Opteron 146 @ 2.7ghz at the moment. Would I see a big improvement going to an E6600 and trying to squeeze some extra out of it? Mainly just surfing/gaming.

Cheers

Also would a Hiper 580W Type-R psu be sufficient to power it?

 

[w3bbo]

You wont see a massive improvement in gaming and certainly not in surfing the net (not cpu dependant). If gaming is your vice then a graphics card upgrade would give you a bigger boost, depending on what you have at the moment.

 

[[TR]SweetSpotOz]

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[Johnny Girth]

Hmm, guess what I'm getting at is will there be something bigger fairly soon?

Or will there be any significant price drops soon?

There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy any kind of AMD chip at the moment so do they have something planned that's going actually provide competition?

 

[DJKahuna]

AMD have their own quadcores on the way soon. Codenamed 'quadfather', it's 4 cores in 1. However, you will need a new motherboard and ram (DDR2) so it's gonna be quite expensive. Get an X2 while you can. I have to guess you're using socket 939 and not AM2. But like w3bbo said earlier, a new GPU upgrade would give you far more for now. But, games are starting to have multi-core optimisations. Lemme put it this way, CellFactor doesn't run good enough to play on a single-core (such as the 146 you have now). On a Dual-core, if you enable software emulation mode, it runs 'perfectly'.

I did a comparison between my old A64 3200+ @ 2.4Ghz and my new X2 4600+ X2. There was a staggering 25% difference. Here's the image:

Notice in particular the difference between the 3 custom HL2 timedemos and 3DM05 CPU score. This is with the spec in my sig.

So as you can see, it's a hell of an increase.

 

[joeyjojo]

Since the numerical values are so different you will have to standardise them before summing them. An increase from say 70 on the single to 75 on the dual will have a very small impact compared to say, 10000 to 30000.

Or just find the percentage increases for each test and average those.

 

[Sean_UK]

Hmm this is interesting, have the option of 2nd hand el'cheapo dual core 4600 and was told 'wouldnt see hardly any diff' going from single core 4000+ to dual 4600+

 

[Street]

I did a comparison between my old A64 3200+ @ 2.4Ghz and my new X2 4600+ X2. There was a staggering 25% difference. Here's the image:

You're also comparing a CPU running at 2.4GHz to one clocked to 2.8GHz.. Not really a fair comparison