Dual core or single Core for gaming?

[HotStuff]

This summer is my "once every two years" major upgrade time.

I am torn between

3.6Ghz(single core) HT 2MB cache

or

3.2Ghz (Dual core) 2x2MB cache

Both are roughly the same price. Obviously I would want BF2 to play well and any future games.

Any informed opinions and thoughts would be welcome.

 

[Gopha]

Well, by dual core you mean systems and not as in SLi,but It would be best to browse around see who else has it

 

[Wraith]

I can't claim gospel knowledge as I'm not a techie, but I believe that no games at the moment are coded to take advantage of a dual core processor (and I seem to remember someone being unable to run SW Empire At War as it's not compatible with DC). So as far as gaming is concerned, the dual core functionality is probably not worthwhile.

In my opinion you'd probably be better off going for the slightly faster single core processor.

Wraith

 

[elDiablo]

Dual Cores are USELESS at the moment (unless you use Photoshop, etc)...

Dual CPUs wont be used in games for a good few years yet, and if you are a semi-serious gamer, you will upgrade in a few years anyway! By which time the CPUs will have over doubled in speed! The best thing people have said is you can play BF2 AND encode video at the same time. Which is true. But why would you want to? And you would need separate HDDs anyway, and the access time would take a BIG hit otherwise...

SLi and Crossfire is a good thing however, and its not code dependent (the hardware sorts it all out). SLi is better then Crossfire though

 

[Pestcontrol]

Hmm, if you get dualcore i advise you to get AMD. AMD pulls ahead further on dualcores and they're generally better value for money for the time being.

Intel's current DC's are two dies on one substrate, both sharing one FSB. This gives it the same poor scaling the dual Xeon has (it's essentially the same thing). AMD have two cores on one die, both hooked up to the internal crossbar without sharing any bandwidth. This means all the traffic between the two cores happens at core speed and doesn't reduce effective memory bandwidth or latency. The architecture was desgined with dualcore in mind from the very beginning.

Intel's dualcores are also thermally limited and therefore lag more speedgrades behind their single core counterparts compared to AMD's DC's, and less overclockable because of the increased electric load on the FSB, and you'll need some very mighty cooling before you can even try. Dual and especially Quad Xeons have always lagged behind P4's in bus speed for the same reason. Parallel busses are so 90's

Current games don't specifically include dual core support, but that doesn't mean there is no benefit. You'll lag less because the other core can handle all other tasks (teamspeak, xfire) so the first isn't interrupted, and low level system things like hardware interrupts, networking and sound mixing run in separate threads already. The latest graphics card drivers can take advantage too.

And future games _will_ be able to take advantage. DC's definitely not a bad buy. Games can't really be incompatible with DC unless they were improperly coded to take some advantage of it.

If it's AMD, that is. If you must buy Intel, i'd get the single core now and upgrade to a nice cool proper dual core Conroe based chip later, currently scheduled for q4 2006 and looking to take the performance crown back with a big margin.

 

[thatbloke]

I have heard lots of stories of dual core processors not being compatible with particular programs (or maybe that should be the other way round?) so I personally would stick with a single core processor for now, especially as there is very little software that actually takes advantage of the lovely dual core-ness

 

[Pestcontrol]

I haven't heard any stories of incompatibility with software. DC also isn't something software needs to be specifically optimised for, it simply allows your computer to do two things at once.

 

[DeZmond]

Well, I would advise you go with AMD, and get something in their new AM2 socket which will be hitting stores sometime soon, but since in the past you've made it perfectly clear that you're an Intel fan (yes, I even remember the "acceptable voltage threshold" diagrams!) then I'd say go for dual core if you're going to be gaming with it in the future, which you've indicated you will do.​

Also, make sure that whatever you buy has 64-bit support. You can check this by checking the model numbers of the relevant Intel processors - I think by their current naming convention processors with a model number ending with a 0 are 64-bit, however you can check this by going to their website. (www.intel.com)​

However, now is really not the best time to do an overall system upgrade. You are much better off waiting for the end of this year, when the aforementioned technologies have had some time to mature and have some software that actually takes advantage of them. Also, if you like to be on the cutting edge, then Vista will also be out around that time.​

Also, on your graphics card issue, remember that if you buy now, you've got DirectX 9.0c support. If you buy at the end of the year, when Vista comes out, you get DirectX 10 support. And since you want a system that lasts I'd recommend waiting and getting the new stuff.​

Honestly, your current system is fine. The 6800 is powerful enough for now and your processor is perfectly capable (3.2Ghz P4 HT, if I remember correctly?)​

 

[Pestcontrol]

Socket AM2 is scheduled to launch in june i think, Intel's Final Solution for dealing with AMD is titled Conroe and will be launched in q4 2006, Vista has been posponed to 2007, in response NVidia and ATI have both announced to be postponing their DX10 designs accordingly.

I think you should only wait when there's something big coming very soon. DX10 is not worth waiting for, imho. If you buy AMD you could afford to wait for AM2, if you buy Intel i'd say do it now, don't spend too much and upgrade later. Anyone who is capable of comparing numbers would buy AMD though.

Vista won't require DX10 compatible hardware in order to run, and it will be some time before DX10 games are common.

 

[DeZmond]

Well apparantly to take advantage of some of Vista's effects you need DirectX 10 (source: Gamespot Vista preview). However I'm sceptical as to the effectiveness of Conroe - once AMD get off their behinds and actually produce a native processor design (albeit in the form of an engineering sample) for the AM2 socket then hopefully we'll see the architecture really taking advantage of the available bandwidth of the faster memory.

 

[DeZmond]

Apparantly dual core processors were incompatible with the latest NFS. However you can fix this, and other annoying dual core issues, by right clicking on the process in the task manager, and modifying the processor affinity to simply one core only. Works like a charm.

 

[Pestcontrol]

If you look at this article over at Anandtech, you'll see there's a performance gap AMD will very likely not be able to close in 8 months time or so. Especially when considering it's already benched against a 2.8 GHz A64. Final products usually perform better than such early samples, too. Socket AM2 will bring more bandwidth, and slightly lower latencies, it's mainly important because DDR is an end-of-life technology, it'll be faster but how much is debatable, AMD never was really short on bandwidth to begin with.

The main problem here is that AMD hasn't significantly upgraded their achitecture since it was launched almost three years ago, new revisions have brought small floating point improvements and a better memory controller, but that's it. There are rumors of a K8L with doubled floating point execution capacity (should make good fp code 50-ish % faster), good, but even that won't make it faster than Conroe because the chip's still massively faster on the integer side.

Vista's prettiest 3d desktop will be using DX10, yes, but noone's ever seen a screenshot of that, and it isn't needed to run vista, either. I wouldn't buy or wait for expensive graphics hardware just to get some desktop effects.

 

[HotStuff]

Thanks guys for this help. It will give me a lot of food for thought!

 

[Gibsonfire]

I haven't heard any stories of incompatibility with software. DC also isn't something software needs to be specifically optimised for, it simply allows your computer to do two things at once.

Well I have a dual core system (AMD 4200+) and I find the only problem with them is that certain games cannot run on them, for example Star wars battlefront 2, and the older Command and conquers. What happens is that since the game is not optimised for it, it thinks there are two completly seperate processors and runs them both at 100% and this basically makes the games crash to desktop after about 5 minutes. However all newer games are now being optimised for dual core so im not too fussed about it. I find dual core setups excellent and I would highly recommend them to you as they load power hungry programs much faster than a single processor.

 

[Pestcontrol]

Actually, dual core is the same as dual cpu (or even hyperthreading) in terms of compatibility, what happens with these games is that they use multiple threads, but do not expect them to all run at once, rather one at a time. This can lead to faulty conditions of data not being ready or memory accessed by two threads at once. In programming terms, it is not "thread safe". Dez's suggestion should fix that.