Should I go X2?

[fredhe12]

Okay, I'm trying to deal with a case of upgraditis by throwing some practicality at it. Hopefully it works

Currently running A64 3500+ Venice - but after reading many, many posts about the X2, I'm thinking maybe dual core is the way to go for me. I'm definitely a gamer, although I don't tend to play the heavy 3D, graphics intensive games that are the latest on the market. So far I'm very happy with gaming performance from my current setup of the 3500 with the 7600GT.

I like what I'm reading about the X2 being able to handle multiple apps. That is something I do. I might be copying a DVD, while surfing the net and working on a Word doc. Or I might be doing some graphics work with several Adobe apps running at once. It sounds like dual core might be beneficial in these cases.

What I don't want to do is sacrifice current gaming performance. So would, say a 3800+ X2 be an "upgrade"? Or at worst a lateral move, but with the added dual core performance without decreasing gaming performance?

comments welcome!

 

[stevty2889]

Burning a DVD while browsing the internet and using word, isn't really CPU intensive multitasking, so not sure the uprade would really be worth it. I mean my Dothan handles those things with ease. Gaming performance however is mainly limited by the video card, so the CPU change would have almost no effect at all there.

 

[pang]

I agree with stevty2889.

A couple buddies of mine were running a single core 3700 and a dual core 3800 side by side. There was hardly any noticable difference in gaming and basic everyday use like burning a DVD while surfing the internet.

 

[JSFLY]

Originally posted by: pang
I agree with stevty2889.

 

[NaOH]

Don't upgrade until later. A misconception that people have is that you will be able to encode stuff while gaming and so forth. You are still going to have a hard drive bottleneck unless you get seperate hard drives for your games and OS/APPS. Even then.....just wait for prices to go down, you are better off upgrading to a 7900GT. Unless you do A LOT of video editing would I recommend it (After Effects, Photoshop, dvd enconding using CCE, etc).

 

[v8envy]

Plus, you still have the same pipe to your ram. Unless you know that CPU integer or floating point ops are your current bottleneck, going from a 3500+ single core to a 3800+ dual core is likely to be absolutely imperceptible in anything but synthetic benchmarks designed to detect multiple cores. You may even have a minor loss of performance in some benchmarks.

If you're gonna upgrade, wait till Conroe is out and make your evaluation then. A move from 3500+ to 3800+ X2 is a horrible way to spend $280.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: JSFLY

Originally posted by: pang
I agree with stevty2889.

 

[buzzsaw13]

If you got the 3800, you'd see a slight improvement in multitasking, but not really much to justify the cost.

 

[TecHNooB]

You're fine where you are.

The one thing you should know is that multitasking on dual core system is not what it's cracked up to be, for several reasons. First, there's the issue with current harddrives not being fast enough to let the processor just run with it. Then there's the fact that Windows load balancing just plain sucks. I think we're all waiting on a SP3, which was supposed to improve dual core performance and include MS Hotfix; the one everyone already has. So multitasking isn't that big of an improvement. And Windows is still unresponsive at times.

As far as gaming is concerned, none of the processors right now are fast enough to bring out the full capability of any next-gen video cards.

If you must upgrade, see what conroe or AMD's next gen has to offer. Although systems will still be limited by the HD/RAM, at least you'll be able to bring out the quickness in your current video card =)

 

[Dadofamunky]

I agree with TechNooB. Windows is the real bottleneck. That said, I have no latency with the multitasking functions I constantly perform (the sort of things talked about above) and I did experience glitches doing so on my 3700+ in the past. I found the dual-core to be very helpful, even at stock speeds.

So I would wait a bit longer to see if Socket 939 dual-cores go down in price when M2 comes out. Won't be long now. But AMD seems to be getting into the habit of introducing a new line of chips and immediately cutting off availability of the previous line. Video card makers do it all the time because to do otherwise hurts their margins. Selling off old inventory at cut-rate prices is not always the rule anymore.

All that being said, you should be able to get 4200+ or 4400+ S939 chips on eBay or OEM pretty cheap sometime soon. That's when to pounce. Scour the online vendors and Fry's and stuff like that.

 

[Amaroque]

One question... Are you adverse to overclocking? You should be able to get that 2.2GHz CPU to 2.5GHz, maybe a lot higher. @ 2.5GHz, it would smoke the 1MB 2.4GHz 4000+

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: TecHNooB
You're fine where you are.

The one thing you should know is that multitasking on dual core system is not what it's cracked up to be, for several reasons. First, there's the issue with current harddrives not being fast enough to let the processor just run with it. Then there's the fact that Windows load balancing just plain sucks. I think we're all waiting on a SP3, which was supposed to improve dual core performance and include MS Hotfix; the one everyone already has. So multitasking isn't that big of an improvement. And Windows is still unresponsive at times.

Multitasking on dual core machines IS what its cracked up to be. You cant just throw the HDD subsystem into the mix and claim its too slow for SMP in general. For many multitasking jobs, the HDD is not the decisive factor. It is, however, for others. Like video encoding or picture processing. You would be crazy to do any video processing/encoding with just one HDD and expect cutting edge performance while doing other jobs at the same time. Either work with multiple independent HDDs or RAID0.
Of course, you also need a decent amount of RAM if you're into serious and heavy multitasking. 512MB just dont cut it.

Also, windows load balancing, as you call it, isnt the main culprit here. This famous MS hotfix is also not related to it. It merely fixes a problem with the processors timestamp-counters that may cause windows (and Linux as well) to stumble over P-, C- and STPCLCK states of C'n'Q, if threads use them to synchronize with one another based on their readout, resulting in decreased (and some cases, turbo) speed for certain applications, mostly games though. AMD announced improved counters on their processors for the future to avoid problems such as these. But this is not directly related to multitasking performance, despite it may seem so because you can avoid it by setting affinity.

Its the memory management in windows that will make you lose your sleep. The way it works, even with plenty RAM, windows will still swaps large portions to the disk resulting in unnecessary disk trashing. Even when running with a larger system cache, you cant totally prevent this behavior.