What Are Your Views Of The Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Socket 939 ToledoCore?

[Pablo72]

Thinking of upgrading my current 64 4000+ single core, that is sitting on an A8N SLI Deluxe mobo, to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Socket 939, ToledoCore, 2x 2.2GHz.

Is this a good upgrade... or should I wait a little longer and go for a total upgrade to Conroe?

Cheers guys.

 

[Nymins]

You probably wont notice much improvement in single threaded applications like games. But it should improve the overall performance of your system and will give a boost in games like Supreme Commander and other dual core supported games.

 

[Pablo72]

Would you get a similar situation with Conroe? In a sense that in single threaded apps there is no improvement, but things get tasty in multi-threaded apps?

The reason I ask is that I can upgrade my current system to dual core skt 939/8800GTS for around £400.00. The other alternative is to build a whole new system, mobo skt 775/conroe/ddr2/8800gts/case for a lot more money.

With the advent of quad core and 8900's getting cheaper within the next 12-16 months, I was looking for a quick fix to get me into Supreme Commander/STALKER gaming at decent fps.

Out of interest, what would you do?

 

[Nymins]

Well i had the idea of going to C2D from my athlon 3000+. But i may just get a cheap X2 3800+ 939 until quad core comes out so the prices will drop more. Not too sure how the Conroes work in single threaded games, but i would assume they are the same as the Athlons that they only use 1 core. But the Conroes will perform better overall in games compared to their Athlon counterparts.

I would personally wait until quad core or wait until the new price of the c2d's come out next month and see how it plays out.

 

[squiffy]

If you do multi-tasking where one or two applications are high CPU usage you will notice the difference between SC and DC. I have a 3700+ 2.2ghz SC and 4400X2 2.2ghz DC and when I'm multi-tasking (ripping/encoding plus gaming) the difference is startling. The 3700+ is unusable whilst encoding, the dual core isn't.

 

[Pablo72]

I would personally wait until quad core or wait until the new price of the c2d's come out next month and see how it plays out.

Thanks for the advice. Looks like I'll play the waiting game a while longer!

 

[bobert50]

I installed supreme commander on my pc yesterday just to see how it runs on my E6600 + 8800GTS + 2 gig ram. The answer? very badly! even on 1024 x 768 the fps would often drop below 20fps in battles. If you think C&C 3 runs @ max fps (30) solid as a rock with 3 times better graphics you have to wonder why it runs so badly though!

So i'd definately holdout if thats one of the main games your wanting to play

 

[drunkenmaster]

Bobert50, that has nothing to do with your graphical settings, or almost nothing/. if you whack it up to 1680x1050 and almost top settings you shouldn't see virtually any drop in performance. units in big battles on sup commander means 1000's of movement calculations, 1000's of projectile and laser vector calculations, damage and ai all going on. the difference between cnc3 and sup com, about a thousand units more in sup com. its probo one of 3 games a quad core will help on now and over the next year, and its mainly due to the scale of it. they could simply have made the units more powerful, take and do 30% more damage and reduce the units the cpu will use and reduce the amount of whatever to stop you producing as many and suddenly the game would run much better for everyone.

but as i said, its a very very rare situation which virtually no other games have the issue.

a quick/cheap upgrade to a dual core athlon will keep you completely happy for now. little point upgrading to a conroe today as a e6600 will be £160 in a couple months, and around september the quad core version will drop to the same price. there are just going to be insane amounts of price dropping this year due to heavy price wars. then you might not be buying a intel cpu at all, Intel have never offered these kinda cuts except like once before. after they were behind ath 64 performance, and then the x2's came out intel decided to compete on price for the first time in 5 years. gives you a hint at amd performance thats coming. i didn't think a quad core E6600 would be sub £300 for the next year, let alone half that cost in 6 months.

sounds like intel are bringing in intergrated mem controllers aswell, but only for xeons and making EE/XE versions probo xeons as they sound like they'll be only desktop cpu's with intergrated mem controllers, assuming for the native quad core parts

 

[bobert50]

Yea i just meant that probably no pc right now for sensible money is even close to capable of running it well when theres a lot of units on the screen so i'd hate someone to fork out £500-800 on nice new pc especially for Supcom and not be able to run it well