Slow Dual Core Performance?!?! 4600x2

[Nocky666]

My spec is:

AMD 4600x2 @2.4Ghz
A8N-Sli SE mobo
7900GT 256mb OC'd
2GB PC3200
430Watt psu
Windows XP (Home SP2)

I've recently upgraded from a 3700+ to the 4600x2 but haven't really noticed any performance improvement. I mainly play games like Counter Strike Source and haven't really noticed any fps increase (avg. 60 fps on 32 man servers) despite it being a cpu intensive game. Is this to be expected?

I have installed the latest amd drivers and dual core optimizer. So is there anything else i should install or uninstall?

Thanks

 

[lee87]

That's normal, both the 3700+ and X2 4600+ will be the same speed when using a single core program. You will only notice a difference when playing games that make use of dual core.

 

[neologan]

3700+ = 2.2 GHz with 1mb cache
4600+ = 2.4 GHz with 2x512k cache

in other words, there's not a great deal of difference between the two for gaming, a 200 mhz clock increase but a smaller cache.

you could try overclocking it?

 

[Cyber-Mav]

3700+ = 2.2 GHz with 2x1mb cache

are you sure about that?

 

[DJKahuna]

You should see a small difference. I noticed, that once i'd overclocked mine, i got ~25% increase in performance in my system suite (A mix of benchmarks, Custom HL2 demos, SuperPi, etc.) but that is most likely down to the clock speed.

Be patient my friend, we'll have the Valve Multithreading/Multicore patch here in a few months which will make a hugh difference (it's said to be about 40% on an equivalent clocked Dual-core over a single-core (so 2.4Ghz single-core vs 2.4Ghz dual-core will bring approx. 40% increase on the dual-core). True SMP (That's multithreading in short basically) games are starting to arrive. This area has just started to be explored by game developers in about the past year.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

biggest difference dual core made for me was in winrar. loads faster at raring stuff up.

 

[neologan]

are you sure about that?

hehehe small error there

 

[Cyber-Mav]

hehehe small error there

heheh easily done.

do you know of any software that can make use of dual core like winrar can? so far my 3dm06 cpu score went from 1135 which was using single core opteron @ 2.9ghz to 2115 using my dual core opty. thats a big boost but want to see where the real world gains can be made.

 

[~>Dg<~]

itunes should see good boost. think winrar, dualcore games(only handfull though) biggest reason i upgraded to dualcore was video encoding and stuff .half the time that old venice did over a day a lot of time saved.

 

[lay-z-boy]

heheh easily done.

do you know of any software that can make use of dual core like winrar can? so far my 3dm06 cpu score went from 1135 which was using single core opteron @ 2.9ghz to 2115 using my dual core opty. thats a big boost but want to see where the real world gains can be made.

Photoshop
paint .net
encoding
a/v production
multitasking
small number of games

Well that's my main uses for dual core anyway.

OP: The source engine (the one that hl2 and css use) is single threaded, it is to be expanded to multiple threads later on this year however.