Worth swapping to Core 2 DUO

Yan816

Yan816

Yan816

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18 Oct 2002
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I currently have an AMD 64 3700 (San Diego socket 939), DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D, GeIL 2GB PC3200 and a 512MB HIS ATI Radeon X1900XT.

Is it worth swapping the motherboard, processor and ram over to a Core 2 DUO system? I mainly use my system for gaming. Your advice would be greatly appreciated. :)
 
Yeah mate, the conroe is ever so slightly overhyped in some ways.

Your PC is more than capable of playing the latest and greatest games, and will still be capable for a fair while to come.

If you get a conroe, you will only find an improvement if oyu get a good one, and even then ,you are going to have to clock it way over standard in order for it to be worth getting rid of your current system for ( Unless you want 2 PCs of course )

I got a conroe a few weeks back, and its great, its fantastic its amazing blah blah blah, and yet, its upstairs still being fannied about with and my 2 main PCs are still my Opteron 144 and the x2 4400... cos they feel much more responsive with multiple apps than the Conroe does... Even if the conroe is kicking their bottoms in SuperPI.

Dont waste money mate... Not for just a few extra %
 
I went from an Opty 175 @ 2.7ghz to a core2 E6600 @ 3.4ghz and the difference is amazing... more responsive in windows and my minimum framerate in games has increased by 50% in some cases (notably Company of Heroes which lagged like hell on my A64 and is now smooth as butter) and a marked improvement in others. If you can sell your old kit for a decent price like I did and not make a real loss by upgrading then yeah... it's a no-brainer.
 
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I upgraded from an Opti 170 @ 2.8 to my current spec. Benchies say its a lot quicker and games do run smoother but around the desktop I am sure there is not much in it.

As richdog says if you can sell your old hardware for a good price then its worth doing.

I am glad I did upgrade just to stay current.

Don't hang on to your old hardware too long as it becomes worthless.

Matt
 
I would say no. It may be a bit nippier here and there but what you have now is more than enough for the latest games. If you do lots of encoding and blah blah whatever back to back then by getting a conroe you'll have an extra couple of minutes spare after each job.
 
A64 system to a Core 2 duo is a no brainer as an upgrade. Point is to sell what you have for a decent price, and the time has passed for good cash for the outdated A64 stuff...sorry
 
Guess it depends on your finances but personally I don't think you need it, if you want a hand spending money however... :)
 
i went from a 3700+ @ 3ghz to the 6400 you see in my sig and i can tell you that the difference is incredible! windows so much zippier, and just everything more responsive but i do agree that if the finances aren't as high as you'd hope then it's not really worth it, but if the money's going spare then why not it's a great upgrade that will last!
 
For gaming, I'd only upgrade if you notice yourself having problems, and even then, it's almost certainly better to spend on the GPU.

I have one Allendale (e6300) that's used for encoding really often, and the difference between my old Athlon and the new CPU is astounding, it's sliced the time it takes pretty much in half.

I'd look at it like, do you want to make the leap to dual core from single core. If you're just gaming, i doubt it, unless it's with the upgrade it's now or never for a year or more.
If you do, I'd go for the allendales as being the best value for money/performance at the moment at the enthusiast end.
 
I've said this before, but a part of the speed increase in 'zippier' windows from changing processors is down to starting from scratch on a fresh format, as most people have to do.

Clogged windows full of background processes and crap < Fresh windows with very few processes.
 
This is so very true.

I myself have next to nothign on my C: and I F&R pretty much every 5 minutes, so I try to have a constantly clean system... In as much as can be with Windows.

No matter how good you think you are at keeping a PC clean from anything, there is no way on earth that you iwll have it 100% clean after being used for only a few weeks, there is always junk left behind in one form or another.
 
I believed the hype it's purely technical.

you won't see any difference i have a E6400 and well apart from 2 secs faster loading XP there's no reason to buy it.
Unless you are into video encoding in a big way.

There I do see a difference when encoding.
 
The speed that XP Loads up has nothing at all to do with the speed of a CPU exept perhaps when your CPU has a small cache.
Its more to do with the HD or installed Apps that will affect the loading times.

I got a K6/2 500 that loads up XP in about 15 seconds and my main PC takes 30

Does that mean, my K6 is twice as fast as my x2 4400?

No, it menas that my K6 has nothing in it and my x2 has a PCI IDE Card that needs to check up on whats connected to it etc.
 
I didnt think windows was any zippier with conroe than when i had a 3800 dual core and a 4400 dual core.

sorry, but you cant notice the minute difference there would be.

Tom
 
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