Dual Opteron242...Is it worth it?

[EagleSnipa2]

My friend is helping me build a computer and says that if I can afford it, I should definately get 2 Opteron 242s and he says that since there is load ballancing, that it would even be good for gaming...True or false?

Please, if possible, cite references...

NOTE: This will be a gaming PC...

 

[BW86]

if its a gaming pc dont get dualies. Get an Athlon FX-55. Dualies are mostly for servers

 

[EagleSnipa2]

I'd like an explanation on why dualies aren't good for gaming, if possible.

 

[uOpt]

No.

High-performance games are not multithreaded and not in multiple processes.

Load balancing is something entirely different and refers to farms of machines (not CPUs).

 

[EagleSnipa2]

So an AMD64 FX-55? Cool...I'll look into it...Thanks for the quick replies...more replies are VERY welcome ^_^

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: EagleSnipa2
I'd like an explanation on why dualies aren't good for gaming, if possible.

I think "dualies aren't good for gaming" isn't the right terminology. Perhaps better terminology would be "duallies aren't better for gaming." I think someone here had posted gaming benchmarks with HyperThreading versus same setup with HyperThreading disabled. Probably the only time HyperThreading or dual CPUs would be better than a single CPU in gaming (with today's games) is if there were other CPU intensive programs running in the background while you were gaming.

In short, if you only play games, the second CPU would be idle.

 

[karlreading]

just to go slightly off topic for a secound, but form IIRC quake 3 engine games ( or at Least q3 ) CAn make use of dual cpu's.

also, does anyone no if this extends to doom 3??
karlos

 

[sbuckler]

Actually looking to the future dual processors will help. At the moment they don't but it doesn't matter because 1 opteron 242 is much faster then you need for any game. However when everything goes dual core (two processors on one chip), the dual opterons today will offer the same performance as a high end 2006 dual core system. Obviously by then games will be threaded to take advantage of both cores. Also dual processors make your system much smoother when not gaming. On the downside they cost a fortune.
If you seriously want to spend that much money for a gaming machine you really also want an sli motherboard (to allow you to run 2 high end nvidia graphics cards at once) as graphics normally matter more for games then processor speed. Might have to wait a few months for dual opteron sli motherboards too arrive.