To Dual Core or Not to Dual Core?

[Magnulus]

Hey, I currently have an Athlon 3000 Venice. I bought it cheap about 4 months ago after I fried my motherboard, which had an Athlon 2400.

I can't help but think a dual core Athlon, maybe an Athlon X2 3800, would be cool to have. I play alot of the regular games like FPS's, but I also play chess using Chessmaster 9K, Crafty and Chessbase, the latter two of which can use multiple cores. I'm not the greatest player (probably around 1200... at least according to Chessmaster) but I'm working on it. doing a good analysis with Chessbase can take some time, and a dual core would just about double the nodes that the engine could look at per second (currently it looks at about 1.2 million).

I also do alot of music ripping, but I use Ogg Vorbis mostly, which I don't think is multithreaded yet, but I like to listen to music while I rip, and on the fly ripping can use all your CPU, and I also use Paint Shop Pro.

So, what do you think, is dual core worth it, and if so, when? I've read that AMD will start making more Socket 939 processors in their new fab, which might lead to a price drop next month. And also they will roll out 65nm models next year (but will those be socket M2 only?).

 

[tallman45]

Tech pricing will always eventually fall, that is a historical certainty

Get the Dual core, now that they are available and affordable, SW makers will now have to develop products in order to stay competitive.

I am in the same boat and have decided that Dual Core is the way to go

 

[rsatat]

I just picked up a dual core 2 days back. Yet to receive it though.

 

[McGeyser]

Though most apps and games are not multi threaded, Windows Xp still performs load balancing, and in effect uses both cores. The new 81.XX forceware now utillizes both cores for gaming. I bought a Logitech G15 keyboard, it has the LCD screen with a performance monitor for Ram and CPU usage. The LCD screen shows both individual cores activity, and with BF2, I am using anywhere from 46% in loading, to 85-95% in game, so both cores are being used for gaming these days, regardless if the game is multi threaded. Get a dual core, you won't be dissapointed.

 

[Magnulus]

Wow, I have an NVidia card, and I did a double check and apparrently the drivers are now multi-threaded, with some performance boost. Looks good, I'm sold.

Why does AMD rate their dual core processors so low? As near as I can tell it essentially will increase performance in many multithreaded applications by 90 percent. Like I said with Crafty chess engine it essentially doubles the power of the engine, which is especially valuable for evaluating moves, reducing the time to find the "best" move for a particular situation to around 6-10 seconds instead of 12-20. Also with some media encoders the performance is almost double.

 

[hectorsm]

McGeyser,

Not sure if the usage you are seeing in dual core with BF2 or other games is worth the cost. Unless he usses a multithreaded application(s) I will not recommend dual core.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

dualcore for a gamer is complete bullsh1t
have a read, this article sums it up very good.
http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/30425/?spage=2

 

[Markfw]

Guys, he does music work, paint-shop, and his chess stuff. He can use dual-core as he already has a lot of multi-threaded software it looks like.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

and u doubt a single core could handle that? not sure bout the chess stuff though.

 

[Markfw]

Sure single core could handle it, but all those apps are multi-threaded I think, in which care single core can't touch the speed of a dual-core setup.

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: McGeyser
The LCD screen shows both individual cores activity, and with BF2, I am using anywhere from 46% in loading, to 85-95% in game, so both cores are being used for gaming these days, regardless if the game is multi threaded. Get a dual core, you won't be dissapointed.

Yes, but lets be clear about what the actual performance gain is:

Hardly any - because most modern games are GPU limited

As for other tasks that benefit from dual core you can see some here (includes Ogg Vorbis)
Comparison of All Modern CPUs

I am sure for your tasks you'll benefit, but I am not sure if that benefit is worth $300. I would rather overclock your current processor and consider moving to M2 socket sometime late next year instead (then I would buy dual-core just in time for Vista).