About AMD,s x2 CPU,s

[MrSweden]

I thinking of getting me an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU.

But now some people are trying wery hard to make me belive that it is a totaly waste of money when 80 % of my use for it is in gaming.
Ok i can understand that moste games dont use the benefit of a dual cpu. yet.
But more then that i cant understan that it should be any problem.
The onece that talked to me about it is saying that it will even lower my prestanda in gaming than a singel cpu 4800+.
I cant understand that, and i dont buy it either. but im not sure anough for not getting a second opinion.

So can you guys help me get this straight in my head and understand ?
explain how it is about that?

(Apologises for my bad english, hope u undestand most of it anyway)

/MrSweden

[FatalSaviour]

A lot of the people that don't recommend dual core CPUs are those that own single core CPUs...
I could well be a bit biased now, owning a 4200+, but I'll try to contribute a bit.

Games which don't take advantage of dual-core, will only run on the 1 core, at the clock speed of that core.
The only significant way in which a dual core CPU can be slower than a CPU of the same performance rating, is if the single core CPU has a higher clockspeed than the two cores of the dual core CPU.

However, you could still be running other threads (antivirus, operating system etc related processes) on the other core while playing your game, so this can still be advantageous.

The only thing I would mention is that most games are GPU limited at present anyway, so any choice of CPU probably won't make as much difference as buying a higher-end graphics card.

Dual core's definitely the way forward though, and it's benefited me immensely when I'm multitasking.

HTH

[-ChEM-]

there will be multi-threaded games soon, then a dual core will be much faster

but... its also all gpu limited so it still wont matter for a while

once conroe comes out, games developers will probably get lazier with their code and that will push up cpu requirements

[MrSweden]

oki thx for answer...
u explained it pretty much as i have understand it to.
so i think im confident in my dual CPU plans..
As i have thougt about it to the dual CPU will in the worst case run in the same speed as a singel CPU. so then what do i have to lose whit it... nothing.
And when im thinking of it.. how often do i use only one operation... even at gaming ?
do i at all.. i hardly think so.. my firewall is allways up. my op allso ofcourse and sometimes msn or some music in the bakround or some streaming and so on..
so i think it will do some diffrens.

Another question:
Hos does the CPU decide what applications goes to that CPU, and what goes to the other and so on ?
I presume i dont have to bother about that realy.. but yest of quriosity (or how the hell u spell it; )

Thx a lot for the answer
/MrSweden

[ash_rm]

Go for the 3800 X2 if you don't mind overclocking. You'll save a lot of money and should be able to clock it to 2.4GHz with ease.

Another question:
Hos does the CPU decide what applications goes to that CPU, and what goes to the other and so on ?
I presume i dont have to bother about that realy.. but yest of quriosity (or how the hell u spell it; )

You can manually set that with affinity setting in Taskmanager. Otherwise I think it just shares it between the two, I think?

If its a multi-threaded application it will use both cores 100%. A lot of video encoding applications take advantage of this as well as some new games.

[Veles]

I play mostly games with my 3800+ X2, no worse in games really apart from Rome: TW is a little choppy at full settings. More games will support dual cores as they;re becoming so popular now, and also the newer consoles have multi-cores so more game devs will be making multi core enabled games.

Also remember that most of the grunt work is offloaded to the GPU, although the CPU still does alot, a 1GHz A64 wis more than enough for most games if you've got a decnt setup elsewhere.

Dual cores are amazing, I hate using anything else now.

My 3800+ will easily overclock to 4200+ speeds just using the 10% overclock function of my mobo (I'm too lazy to actually OC properly). I've heard they can easily reach 4600+ speeds and probably 4800+ speeds to. So I reccomend you get that (TBH I hardly notice the diffeerence between a 3800 and a 4200, and 3800GHz equivalent is still alot of horsepower).

As for chooseing which core the program uses, I think the PC spreads the load evenly between the two, but if you put on a program that uses alot of CPU, that will use 1 core (if it's a single threaded application) and the PC will use the other core for most of the smaller applications I think. You can aslo set the affinity in taskmanager like ash said, this can be helpful for some games, when I played R: TW I found that the game run at double speed, setting the affinity to just 1 core solved this problem. There is a driver patch out now available from the AMD web site that also solves these problems.

[-ChEM-]

I've heard they can easily reach 4600+ speeds and probably 4800+ speeds to. So I reccomend you get that (TBH I hardly notice the diffeerence between a 3800 and a 4200, and 3800GHz equivalent is still alot of horsepower).

it certainly is, ill give you a grand cash for your chip if it can do that

btw the next step up from a 4600+ is a 5000+, the 4800+ is just a 2mb cache version

so you can have the fastest non-FX chip around that isnt even supposed to be on 939 if youre lucky

[MrSweden]

btw the next step up from a 4600+ is a 5000+, the 4800+ is just a 2mb cache version

so you can have the fastest non-FX chip around that isnt even supposed to be on 939 if youre lucky

yes i realized that so i guess it is the 4600+ that is the most intresting for me.

a may clock a bit.. but i will still use aircooling and so on... so any extreme-clocking on either the CPU or GFX is not an option for me.
But i think it doesnt matter so much.
allso.. going to get my new x1900xt in a couple of hours now

[Veles]

it certainly is, ill give you a grand cash for your chip if it can do that

woops

yes i realized that so i guess it is the 4600+ that is the most intresting for me.

Yeah thats also a good money saver as that clocks well too, although buying and clocking a 3800+ really well will give you more bang for your buck, the 4600+ will give you more bang

With a good HSF you should be able to get a half decent OC cooling with air with that chip.

[MrSweden]

With a good HSF you should be able to get a half decent OC cooling with air with that chip.

What does "HSF" mean ?
sorry for stupied question

[ash_rm]

Heat Sink and Fan.

You should also look into the Opteron 165, 1mb cache per core. Excellent Overclockers.

[MrSweden]

oki thx for that