Check out this thread about infinity:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1738671&enterthread=y
Pentium dual aren't the same. Both cores communicate through the northbridge chipset. They're not as fast as the X2s.
Check out this thread about infinity:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1738671&enterthread=y
Pentium dual aren't the same. Both cores communicate through the northbridge chipset. They're not as fast as the X2s.
Well, it doesn't surprise that ignorant ass comment would come from you. You're the only one who gets emotional about this. And you think people who disagree with you have a problem.
The single most logical reason for avoiding X2s now is simply because:
#1. Most people don't have any need for them (encoding etc).
#2. The cost is so much higher, you can save a lot of money by getting a fast single core now and get a much cheaper dual core later.
Actually, I did exaggerate a little just to provoke for a laugh. But you fell for it and it shows how immature you are.
I still agree however with what I wrote. I bet you anyone who buys any variant of the 2.4 GHz AMDs now can wait until quad cores come out and won't be crushed by the games that will come out until then. The reason why I emphasise so much on gaming is because that's the only thing that will tax most people's system's anyway. Does sending an email push your system to its limits? I doubt more powerful graphic cards like the Geforce 8 coming next year will likely be bottlenecked by an Athlon 3700+ or higher.
And Tim Sweeney is not an idiot. If he says Epic cannot make UT2007 fully optimized for dual cores, then many games certainly won't be fully multithreaded yet. Partly multithreaded is not the same.
Quad cores with DDR3 and Vista may be an improvement. But, spending $$$ on an X2 4400+ (the lesser ones aren't fast enough in games anyway) is USELESS for most people. Are you telling me you're ignoring the comment by the guy in General Hardware who said he was unimpressed by his "upgrade" to dual core. He had an Athlon 2800+ (socket 754) and "upgraded" to an X2 3800+ and noticed ALMOST NO DIFFERENCE in performance on ANYTHING he did. Why? Well maybe it's because most people DON'T NEED them yet but people like you are the ones too ignorant to even take a second to think about it and recognize that. It's unethical at this point to make people spend way more than the need to for little to no gain in performance at the current time.
You say it like the X2s came out of a bible. They didn't.
Markfw
Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
- May 16, 2002
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Lets see, people are looking for real feedback and information, and you are playing games, and you say I am immature ?
Yea, right..
Next, many people can utilize two cores, just not you, since all you do is game it seems. The rest of us have use for 2 cores. As for the money ? If you can use it, its worth it, if you can't then don't buy it. And all my single cores don't OC any better than my dual-cores, so I don't see how the argument of getting faster single cores holds, unless you aren't OC'ing, which most people here do. I just can't stand noobs saying they can't be utilized, because they can, but obviously you can't use one.......
I do give real information. UT2004 on an X2 3800+ = 136 fps on a tom's hardware benchmark and 158 fps on a similar setup with a socket 754 3700+. You'll have to pay several hundred more for an X2 4400+ so you can have close to comparable performance.
Markfw
Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
- May 16, 2002
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So you proved my point, if the only thing you do is game and want that exta fps, have no virus software, no antispyware software, don't OC, and don't have the money for dual-core, then get a single core.
Edit: And you are quoting Tomshardware ?? Thats not a good thing, use Anandtech, somebody who knows how to run benchmarks.
Edit: And you are quoting Tomshardware ?? Thats not a good thing, use Anandtech, somebody who knows how to run benchmarks.
ForumPoster said:-
__________________________________________________________________
The single most logical reason for avoiding X2s now is simply because:
#1. Most people don't have any need for them (encoding etc).
#2. The cost is so much higher, you can save a lot of money by getting a fast single core now and get a much cheaper dual core later.
___________________________________________________________________
Forumposter, these two reasons do not apply to me,
I will be able to use two things running at once and even when just playing games what about the operating system overheads, personal firewalls , the virus checker. If you go to a LAN party (which I do) firewalls really ought to be running on your machine.
But if we think forward to 2006 and 2007 which will be the life of the machine i want to buy what then ? Games and other utilities will be using the dual core. I take your point about unreal but we have to give them a chance to catch up.
I have therefore established dual core is going to be 'my future'.
However I have now come across some issues with the AMD X2. These involve a range of games no longer 'working out of the box' with users having to set affinity each time they play for many games. This will be a problem when my kids/wife want to play while I am out.
Also non games seem to be affected, applications like futuremark, cool and quiet and WoW that run with errors or have not been able to run at all.
The information is flaky and not verifiable and also the people posting these issues often get jumped on by AMD biased techys that tell them its the software or they dont know how to set it up. But these guys have replaced their X2 with a single core and the problem goes away.
What I dont want to do is buy a system that will not run everything or needs tweaking before it can be used. I do not mind installing one off drivers, reg edits but I dont want to set up games every day and have things not run.
These issues are slowly pushing me toward a pentium solution as I have not found any reports of these issues on the internet for a Pentium D
I do understand the difference in performance of the AMD solution. The Nforce4 chipset is very nice and supports Sli.
I would not of course use an nforce4 sli solution for a Pentium D solution so I would choose the Intel 955 chipset and this makes a Pentium solution not as flexible for me - but reliability and stability are more important
__________________________________________________________________
The single most logical reason for avoiding X2s now is simply because:
#1. Most people don't have any need for them (encoding etc).
#2. The cost is so much higher, you can save a lot of money by getting a fast single core now and get a much cheaper dual core later.
___________________________________________________________________
Forumposter, these two reasons do not apply to me,
I will be able to use two things running at once and even when just playing games what about the operating system overheads, personal firewalls , the virus checker. If you go to a LAN party (which I do) firewalls really ought to be running on your machine.
But if we think forward to 2006 and 2007 which will be the life of the machine i want to buy what then ? Games and other utilities will be using the dual core. I take your point about unreal but we have to give them a chance to catch up.
I have therefore established dual core is going to be 'my future'.
However I have now come across some issues with the AMD X2. These involve a range of games no longer 'working out of the box' with users having to set affinity each time they play for many games. This will be a problem when my kids/wife want to play while I am out.
Also non games seem to be affected, applications like futuremark, cool and quiet and WoW that run with errors or have not been able to run at all.
The information is flaky and not verifiable and also the people posting these issues often get jumped on by AMD biased techys that tell them its the software or they dont know how to set it up. But these guys have replaced their X2 with a single core and the problem goes away.
What I dont want to do is buy a system that will not run everything or needs tweaking before it can be used. I do not mind installing one off drivers, reg edits but I dont want to set up games every day and have things not run.
These issues are slowly pushing me toward a pentium solution as I have not found any reports of these issues on the internet for a Pentium D
I do understand the difference in performance of the AMD solution. The Nforce4 chipset is very nice and supports Sli.
I would not of course use an nforce4 sli solution for a Pentium D solution so I would choose the Intel 955 chipset and this makes a Pentium solution not as flexible for me - but reliability and stability are more important
Tools have nothing to do with the problems with writing the code for SMP. The problem is load balancing software to efficiently use both cores.
Its not cost effective to optimise for dual core for Unreal Engine 3 because most systems will be single core in 2007. The development cost would far outweigh the demand. Its going to take time, just like X86-64, to get code in place.
Intel and AMD cant just make some magic compiler that will do all the load balancing for something as low level as a game engine.
Sorry but where the hell did you get that from??? This shows that you don't know about gaming... If you really were a heavy gamer you would know that in modern games CPUs have practically no influence.
Before, you posted a comparsison between the X2 3800+ and a 3700+ and the 3700+ was a bit faster but then it means that you look at benchmarks but don't care about under which conditions these are made. You didn't post a link to that benchmark so it is impssible to know the exact set up of the games, but surely it was something like 800x600 without FSAA...and it was like this becuase in this way you make the game non dependent on the GPU and can then notice a difference between CPUs, which, by the way, since the fps are above 100s, it isn't even noticeable for a person.
Now if you put a high resolution and turn on the FSAA, then the diffrences in gaming between CPUs is practically none. For example, in Quake 4 at 1280x1024 with 4xFSAA, the differnece between a X2 3800+ and a super high-end FX-57 is only 1.3 fps...
Were did I get this from? Well, look here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/cpu-games2.html
Ah, one more thing: don't forget that gaming is not the only thing that people does.
(I wrote all this only because that comment of needing at least a X2 4400+ for gaming was really worng)
Bye,
Fedcer
interesting fedcer. I want performance but not at the expense of hassle and stability.
For a quiet life (which means not having to upgrade in the near future and a stable reliable system) I could just about afford this
Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz
ASUS P5WD2 PREMIUM SKT775 1066FSB Intel 955x
XFX 7800GT 256MB DDR3
1gb DDR2 ?
I have to trade a bit lower on performance than the AMD, a bit less flexible as I lose sli
but should behave itself and run everything i throw at it at a good enough pace
For a quiet life (which means not having to upgrade in the near future and a stable reliable system) I could just about afford this
Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz
ASUS P5WD2 PREMIUM SKT775 1066FSB Intel 955x
XFX 7800GT 256MB DDR3
1gb DDR2 ?
I have to trade a bit lower on performance than the AMD, a bit less flexible as I lose sli
but should behave itself and run everything i throw at it at a good enough pace
Mark is right, the "problems" people claim to have with the X2 are people who dont take advice when they ask for help on here. Hell one of them doesnt even own an X2 and spreads fud about it, but i think he got banned for a 2nd time.
If you do a fresh windows install, and install the X2 driver, you are very unlikely to have problems.
If you do a fresh windows install, and install the X2 driver, you are very unlikely to have problems.
Well, problems for some and some don't have problems.
In this case, it may be something like the motherboard. I mean SOMETHING has the be the cause of all these problems. Remember, Anand still hasn't come out with his results on his investigation on X2 issues.
I already posted a link here to a message where someone said he tried everything that was recommended to him and formatted his HD every time he made a change. Still, he had problems with WoW.
In this case, it may be something like the motherboard. I mean SOMETHING has the be the cause of all these problems. Remember, Anand still hasn't come out with his results on his investigation on X2 issues.
I already posted a link here to a message where someone said he tried everything that was recommended to him and formatted his HD every time he made a change. Still, he had problems with WoW.
I think it is very useful to decide if there are any problems with the X2 or not.
It should be the purpose of this board to highlight any issues so that they can have workarounds developed and eventually be addressed and fixed.
Also It really helps the whole community by informing them of any fixes, and what to buy in the first place to reduce the chance of problems.
Reading some of the forum messages (not this thread) I see that occasionally some replies and problems are passed off when they really should be pointed back to the manafacturers and highlighted so that they can be fixed.
To this end it may be worth defining "what is an X2 problem " ?
Well I think the answer to that question is what can cause differences of opinion
analysing it from my position
A problem with a dual core is detrimental behaviour that occurs on an X2 CPU but the same behaviour does not occur on a single CPU.
(I dont care at this point in the definition what the cause of the problem is game writers, operating system drivers or the CPU design or microcode)
There are 3 possible outcomes or states these problems can be in, they can be
completely fixed by a permanent fix ( for example a driver is updated or a registry entry changed)
The problem can have a workaround - therefore avoiding the behaviour. This is useful to have while we await a fix.
Or the behaviour can be unfixable
I would put the majority of faults that have been raised on this board (I do not own an X2 so have seen none myself) would mainly be in the 'fixed' category. The slowdowns and speedups seem to have been resolved with the driver updates and patches.
The setting of affinity to run programs in a single core is not a fix (imho) but this is a workaround. I believe AMD/M$ or whoever should be working on this now and this forum should be screaming at them to do it.
It is not acceptable to expect users (of all ages) to have to do something extra beyond running the install disc of the program to get it working. It should be the same process for all CPU's
I have not seen any verifiable reports of unfixable problems or programs that wont run on an X2, although certainly a few users have reported programs as broken on an X2.
These people should be given space and support to investigate without getting jumped on.
For me - I am still not putting my money down until I see a bit more.
It should be the purpose of this board to highlight any issues so that they can have workarounds developed and eventually be addressed and fixed.
Also It really helps the whole community by informing them of any fixes, and what to buy in the first place to reduce the chance of problems.
Reading some of the forum messages (not this thread) I see that occasionally some replies and problems are passed off when they really should be pointed back to the manafacturers and highlighted so that they can be fixed.
To this end it may be worth defining "what is an X2 problem " ?
Well I think the answer to that question is what can cause differences of opinion
analysing it from my position
A problem with a dual core is detrimental behaviour that occurs on an X2 CPU but the same behaviour does not occur on a single CPU.
(I dont care at this point in the definition what the cause of the problem is game writers, operating system drivers or the CPU design or microcode)
There are 3 possible outcomes or states these problems can be in, they can be
completely fixed by a permanent fix ( for example a driver is updated or a registry entry changed)
The problem can have a workaround - therefore avoiding the behaviour. This is useful to have while we await a fix.
Or the behaviour can be unfixable
I would put the majority of faults that have been raised on this board (I do not own an X2 so have seen none myself) would mainly be in the 'fixed' category. The slowdowns and speedups seem to have been resolved with the driver updates and patches.
The setting of affinity to run programs in a single core is not a fix (imho) but this is a workaround. I believe AMD/M$ or whoever should be working on this now and this forum should be screaming at them to do it.
It is not acceptable to expect users (of all ages) to have to do something extra beyond running the install disc of the program to get it working. It should be the same process for all CPU's
I have not seen any verifiable reports of unfixable problems or programs that wont run on an X2, although certainly a few users have reported programs as broken on an X2.
These people should be given space and support to investigate without getting jumped on.
For me - I am still not putting my money down until I see a bit more.
Dont get me wrong guys, im definately not on the "get an X2 now for the future" boat. I dont advocate them to anyone but heavy encoders or extreme multitask environments.
However, i will defend the X2 from a lot of the stupidity that flies around these forums. Many people toss in an X2, dont flash the bios, dont research if their mobo even officially supports it, dont even reformat windows after changing such a critical piece of hardware, dont install the AMD driver, and then they go complain about how it doesnt work properly.
If you follow procedure, you wont have problems.
Get the X2, get a bios with official X2 support, format and install, install driver, use it.
Dont forget guys, this forum is generally used as a help forum. For every negative thread you see, theres an order of magnitude more working machines out there without these problems.
However, i will defend the X2 from a lot of the stupidity that flies around these forums. Many people toss in an X2, dont flash the bios, dont research if their mobo even officially supports it, dont even reformat windows after changing such a critical piece of hardware, dont install the AMD driver, and then they go complain about how it doesnt work properly.
If you follow procedure, you wont have problems.
Get the X2, get a bios with official X2 support, format and install, install driver, use it.
Dont forget guys, this forum is generally used as a help forum. For every negative thread you see, theres an order of magnitude more working machines out there without these problems.
Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
Its the only way, ramping up Hz pretty much hit a brick wall. Heck, Intel's specially designed MHz monster couldn't get close to where they wanted to take it...parallelism is the currently the only way to increase the power and performance of our computers until we go quantum
yep !
Markfw
Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
- May 16, 2002
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No, don't even own any stock in them. I just can't stand people who don't know what they are talking about, keep repeating CRAP. As Acanthus said, if you set it up correctly, everything works. Why keep repeat the one or two odd peoples problems who can't set up windows correctly ? I already linked to people who CAN do it right, and I can, since I own several, and I KNOW there is no problem with them.
Sorry missed that, anyway for the OP I don't think a dual core would help that much, although if you arn't upgrading in a while I guess a dual core is as future proof as you can get.
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