cpu speed help...??

[lambo]

hi all I'm new here so sorry if I've posted this in the wrong one.
I have a new laptop and it has the intel dual core 1.7 mhz cpu, a few games I've looked at say's they need at least 2.5mhz to run....now is mine a 1.7 or do ya double it so It's a 3.4mhz...??
thanks

[Kezzer]

No, a game will typically only run on a single core unless it utilises multiple core technology to place other things (such as physics) on another core.

I wouldn't get a laptop to play games anyway, that's not what they're really designed for, they're very "all around" machines.

Also yes, this is in the general discussion forum, there's forums specifically for this kind of question (check the hardware forums)

[kasavien]

The 2.5Ghz that games require will refer to older pentium 4 cpu's at a guess. If your cpu is one of the new intel core duo processors then it will be fine for games. Although given you have a laptop you won't be able to play at high settings unless your laptop has a dedicated graphics card.

Hopefully that's not too confusing, and welcome to hexus

[kalniel]

hi all I'm new here so sorry if I've posted this in the wrong one.
I have a new laptop and it has the intel dual core 1.7 mhz cpu, a few games I've looked at say's they need at least 2.5mhz to run....now is mine a 1.7 or do ya double it so It's a 3.4mhz...??
thanks

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Annoyingly the game requirements aren't very good at actually conveying information. What they mean in this case is that you need a 2.5ghz pentium 4 or equivalent. Pentium 4's are really bad to use as a benchmark measure because they went up to such high speeds without really giving any increase in performance. Now your dual core chip will be a Core Duo I expect, and these perform much better than Pentium 4's. So your 1.7ghz Core Duo is roughly equivalent to a 3.2ghz Pentium 4, hence you are fine for this game. Ignore the dual core bit for now - that doesn't double the speed - the increase I'm talking about is just because the architecture of the pentium 4 is so bad compared to AMD or your chip!

In anycase, don't worry so much about not meeting the CPU requirement - if you're off by a little way it's not going to affect much, compared to the graphics requirement.

[lambo]

thanks so much for the help

[mcmiller]

yeah what ppl are saying is right i have a e6600 and the battlestation midway told me i have a low end cpu, probadly because it was just looking at the mhz

[Saracen]

CPU speed has been a poor indicator of processor performance for some years now, because overall computing power is influenced by so many other aspects of processor design, such as cache size, cache algorithm design, and so on.

That's why AMD moved away from it with the original XPs .... that and the fact that it suited their marketing to do so.