Two machines... Opteron or E8400 for gaming?

[Shyatic]

I have at work a choice of a few machines to make a light purpose (starcraft 2, counterstrike, etc) gaming rig.

One is an HP heavy duty workstation with 8GB of ram and an Opteron 2376 quad core @ 2.3

The other is a 4GB Core2 E8400 @ 3.0

If the video card I put on them is the same, which is the better gaming machine?

Thanks for any advice

 

[sm625]

Is that Opteron 2376 a single cpu or dual cpu?

 

[Shyatic]

Is that Opteron 2376 a single cpu or dual cpu?

Might be dual... it shows up 2 procs in the bios so I'm guessing so, but the entire of the inside of the PC is covred with plastic so I didn't do a lot of digging

 

[sm625]

according to passmark a dual proc quad 2376 (8 cores total) scores over 5800 while the single E8400 scores just 2250. In games the E8400 is going to be 10-20% faster in games that only use 2 threads. But obviously you wont be able to have anything going on in the background otherwise your framerate will drop unpredictably. The opteron would be a much more versatile solution, and I imagine SC2 performance will improve over time if they release patches to offload more threads from the main process.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I imagine SC2 performance will improve over time if they release patches to offload more threads from the main process.

You really think that they are going to bother going in and re-engineering the entire game engine, to support more CPU cores? That's a pretty non-trivial undertaking.

 

[bryanW1995]

e8400 @ 3.0 will likely be your best bet for the next few years, then there will be a couple of years where the two are close, then finally the 2376 would be better. However, by the time the 2376 is clearly superior you probably won't want to use the rig for gaming anymore, so I'd go with the e8400.

 

[nenforcer]

As cool as the dual proc Opteron system is, it won't perform as well in the 2 games you mentioned which are dual core at best, SC2 and Counterstrike.

Go with the E8400 @ 3GHz for anything but a server workload.

 

[MegaWorks]

Is this going to be your main computer? Are you planning to run newer games? If you're going to use it for around 25% gaming then get the opteron.

 

[Rifter]

e8400 @ 3.0 will likely be your best bet for the next few years, then there will be a couple of years where the two are close, then finally the 2376 would be better. However, by the time the 2376 is clearly superior you probably won't want to use the rig for gaming anymore, so I'd go with the e8400.

100% this

 

[Shyatic]

How bout if I throw a monkey wrench into this, and say a Xeon 5160 @3GHz?

I'm all ears folks

 

[nenforcer]

How bout if I throw a monkey wrench into this, and say a Xeon 5160 @3GHz?

I'm all ears folks

The Xeon 5160 is a dual core processor based on Woodcrest (Conroe) aka Core 2 Microarchitecture.

Even though you can go dual processor LGA771 with it the older architecture than the E8400 Penryn along with the possibly slower DDR2 / FBDIMM memory really limits the performance and cost effectiveness of it.

Again, those games only need a dual core processor at best of which the E8400 is the best performer.

You can use the Anandtech bench website to directly compare similar CPU's in gaming and other real world apps

http://www.anandtech.com/bench