How Is An Athlon II 240 Stand Up To Modern Gaming?

[soccerballtux]

Because the C2D is faster and more power efficient? If you are scrimping pennies and getting a dual core, I doubt you are spending much on a MB that would make it important for future upgrades.

What exactly are you referring to being better power management wise? Cool-n-Quiet reduces voltage way lower than SpeedStep-- this is a huge deal if you're overclocking (which most people here do).

Speedstep-- only drops the voltage by 0.02v for every 2x multiplier that it drops. So if it goes from 10x to 6x, you're only going to get a 0.08v power reduction. Example-- my old e2180 would "Speedstep" to "save energy" down to 1.40v from 1.48v at 10x multi.

Cool-n-quiet on the other hand drops down I can control myself-- so mine drops down to 1.08v @ 2.2Ghz and pops up to 1.44v@ 3.5Ghz-- which I rarely need except for when gaming.

 

[nyker96]

that depends on what gpu you are getting and what resolution you are running at. if your gpu and rez becomes your bottleneck in the system then even if get a i7 wouldn't help you have to match the two.

 

[cbn]

What exactly are you referring to being better power management wise? Cool-n-Quiet reduces voltage way lower than SpeedStep-- this is a huge deal if you're overclocking (which most people here do).

Speedstep-- only drops the voltage by 0.02v for every 2x multiplier that it drops. So if it goes from 10x to 6x, you're only going to get a 0.08v power reduction. Example-- my old e2180 would "Speedstep" to "save energy" down to 1.40v from 1.48v at 10x multi.

Cool-n-quiet on the other hand drops down I can control myself-- so mine drops down to 1.08v @ 2.2Ghz and pops up to 1.44v@ 3.5Ghz-- which I rarely need except for when gaming.

The power management you are mentioning sounds nice. Now if only AMD can get into the smaller nodes faster.

 

[soccerballtux]

The power management you are mentioning sounds nice. Now if only AMD can get into the smaller nodes faster.

I'm less worried about nodes and more how they completely missed the netbook segment.
There are no AMD processors that would give me 7.5 hours battery life on a 6cell battery like the Atom does.

 

[Zensal]

AMD - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc,2477.html

Intel - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-balanced-platform,2469.html

Pick you GPU and see if your CPU can keep up. Don't forget to factor in your overclock.

 

[Arkaign]

I think the Athlon II is a decent bargain gaming chip if you're pairing it up with a midrange VC like a 5770 or the like, and overclock it a bit. Quad is obviously even better, but on an extreme budget, I don't see a problem. Going with a DDR3 AM3 board with a decent chipset, you open the door to a Phenom II Quad upgrade pretty easy, and they're probably going to be in the retail channel longer than C2Q series, which is quickly being replaced with i5/i7 stuff.

 

[Phil1977]

I have a AII 250 and although it was good value I am not totally happy with it. It does have to do with the fact that I owned a E8600 once so the 250 seems very slow. Games is ok, but just opening new tabs in Windows and having a few windows open it struggles.

As soon as I can buy intels new i5 dual cores I will switch.

 

[theevilsharpie]

In response to the OP, an Athlon is fine for gaming. Modern games are primarily GPU limited.

I have a AII 250 and although it was good value I am not totally happy with it. It does have to do with the fact that I owned a E8600 once so the 250 seems very slow. Games is ok, but just opening new tabs in Windows and having a few windows open it struggles.

I had an older Athlon x2 2.8GHz-powered quad-monitor workstation with at least a dozen different applications open at any given time, and it never skipped a beat.

Unless you're trying to open up multiple instances of something CPU intensive like Prime95, you shouldn't have any slowdowns opening new browser tabs. If it's slow, there's something wrong with your setup or you've got a bottleneck somewhere else.