Quake3World

Just finished reading Bitwise thread on an amd processor ( AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 San Diego 2.6GHz 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor - OEM)

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25072

one of the reviews says this is better than dual core for gamers. I dont get why - even with oc wouldnt dual be better? is the point that for price comparison, the performance is not significantly higher with dual compared to this

Price and overclocking potential would be my guess.

Dual core doesn't harm gaming but it doesn't offer any real benefits until games are compiled for multiple cores. That's only happening on consoles right now AFAIK.

Dual core chips at the same price point as a single core chip might have 2 cores that are somewhat slower in themselves than the single core for the same price?

Foo wrote: Dual core chips at the same price point as a single core chip might have 2 cores that are somewhat slower in themselves than the single core for the same price?

True but XP itself and most many mainstream desktop apps are already programmed for multithreading and games won't be far behind. IMO its more worth it to go dual core.

thanks both,
think ill stay with teh dual core planed upgrade then.

Plus it's best to be ready for Vista and DirectX10 games.

I'm definately going dual core next upgrade. I've already made the 64 bit jump. I can already see improvements in speed and such. Running the 64 bit Vista RC and it is wonderfull.

Alan Wake on PC will require dual cores (or at least hyperthreading).

Personally, when I next upgrade, and for anyone who plans to upgrade soon I would advice making the jump to dual core. Even though It's not majorly supported it does provide a degree of future proofing. Windows Vista should take advantage of it quite well.

Foo wrote:Dual core doesn't harm gaming but it doesn't offer any real benefits until games are compiled for multiple cores. That's only happening on consoles right now AFAIK

I believe some PC games already are. I can't remember which ones off the top of my head...
Possibly Q4 and Oblivion I'm pretty sure. I forget...

werldhed wrote:
I believe some PC games already are. I can't remember which ones off the top of my head...
Possibly Q4 and Oblivion I'm pretty sure. I forget...

Both of them benefit from dual core.

A lot of people said enabling the smp function in q4 gives you worse performance

dzjepp wrote:A lot of people said enabling the smp function in q4 gives you worse performance

Not for anyone I know that has tried it .

It seemed to work for me... It wasn't a drastic improvement, but it seemed to help.