Duo core or P4 3-4Ghz?

[bignickel]

Hey, when I get back to the States this year, I'm going to need a new machine. I put my brother's hard drive in my machine last Xmas, when I was visiting, because his (which I built out of stuff I had lying around) was shutting down for no good reason.

Usually, I've just bought parts separately, and put my own machines together, but lately, the tech seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of me.

I've been looking at the ads for machines in PC Gamer and the old CGW, and seen a bunch for duo core AMDs and Intels. Usually starting at 3800+ and heading up (not sure what those numbers mean: I'm just used to Ghz speed to describe chips). Some of the newest ads have machines with a Geforce 8800 GTS in them, 2 GB ram, massive SATA hard drive, etc.

So: I wanna finally play HL2, Company of Heroes, and Supreme Commander. Which will do the better job of running those at high settings: a single P4 at 3-4 Ghz, or AMD duo core 3800+ on up, or Intel duo core 3800+ on up?

(one last: I need to move the data off my old IDE drive onto the new machine somehow. Not sure if these new beasts even have IDE connections)

[Stimpson J. Cat]

The Intel Core 2 Duo is currently the fastest CPU available. I have the 6600, which operates at 2.4GHz. It is way faster than my old P4 3GHz was, and from the benchmarks I saw, it is also substantually faster than the Athlon dual core chips.

From what I saw, there is not currently much of a price advantage for the AMD chips either.

For games, the biggest factor is going to be the video card. If you can afford it, the Geforce 8800 is currently the king of the hill there. I have the 7950 myself, and it rocks.

Dr. Stupid

[Wowbagger]

I have an Intel Core 2 Centrino on my new Tablet PC, and it happens to run HL2 surprisingly well, (though a bit less than optimal, because of the graphics chip).

It also runs exeedingly nicely on my AMD x64 desktop, which was state-of-the-art when HL2 was released.

I doubt you'll have a problem with HL2, on either platform. And, it is difficult to predict which will be better for future games.

As Stimpson stated, it is the graphics card that makes the real difference, anyway. Oh, and make sure you got plenty of RAM.

[Prospero]

The best value on the market currently available is the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. They're ~$315 and the cores run at something like 3.67GHz each. They're easily capable of handling all game currently available. With an E6600, your RAM and video card become the bottlenecks.

[four elevener]

The best value on the market currently available is the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. They're ~$315 and the cores run at something like 3.67GHz each. They're easily capable of handling all game currently available. With an E6600, your RAM and video card become the bottlenecks.

Don't you mean 2.4 GHz? :)

I have the E6600 and it's much faster compared to my P4 3.0 GHz...and it's a helluva lot cooler, allowing me to turn my CPU fan all the way down.

[CFLarsen]

My old PC XT still booted faster than the machine I'm on today...

(wipes away a nostalgic tear)

[Wowbagger]

My old PC XT still booted faster than the machine I'm on today...
Any new machine with Windows Vista can boot quite quickly, assuming the Sleep and/or Hibernate functions work properly with your hardware. (I said "new" machine, because some of the old hardware has difficulty with these.)

[Darat]

Any new machine with Windows Vista can boot quite quickly, assuming the Sleep and/or Hibernate functions work properly with your hardware. (I said "new" machine, because some of the old hardware has difficulty with these.)


Ah that's cheating - that's like switching your monitor off and then switching in back on and saying "instant boot-up" :D

[Wowbagger]

Ah that's cheating - that's like switching your monitor off and then switching in back on and saying "instant boot-up" :D
All right, almost.
But for Hibernation, the power is completely shut down (assuming the hardware functions properly). And, Sleep mode doesn't use much power, itself.

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

Hey, when I get back to the States this year, I'm going to need a new machine. I put my brother's hard drive in my machine last Xmas, when I was visiting, because his (which I built out of stuff I had lying around) was shutting down for no good reason.

Usually, I've just bought parts separately, and put my own machines together, but lately, the tech seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of me.

I've been looking at the ads for machines in PC Gamer and the old CGW, and seen a bunch for duo core AMDs and Intels. Usually starting at 3800+ and heading up (not sure what those numbers mean: I'm just used to Ghz speed to describe chips). Some of the newest ads have machines with a Geforce 8800 GTS in them, 2 GB ram, massive SATA hard drive, etc.

So: I wanna finally play HL2, Company of Heroes, and Supreme Commander. Which will do the better job of running those at high settings: a single P4 at 3-4 Ghz, or AMD duo core 3800+ on up, or Intel duo core 3800+ on up?

(one last: I need to move the data off my old IDE drive onto the new machine somehow. Not sure if these new beasts even have IDE connections)
Think of it this way:
32 processor threads at 3 Ghz vs 64 processor threads at 2.4 Ghz ;)

Intel has also released a socket 775 quad core if you really want to go for the gold.

[JonnyFive]

I just upgraded from a P4 3.0 ghz to a E6600 Core Duo. It is considerably faster.

Let me say again, considerably. Substantially, even. ;)

The P4 is a dead issue, definitely go with a Socket 775 and a dual core. You can get the E6600 cheap-ish now, and the price is set to drop sometime this month, I believe.

The new machines do have IDE connectors, as most optical drives are still using the IDE interface (I've seen SATA DVD burners, but it seems rare). Be careful when you do the switch. I would recommend putting in the new HD and getting your OS and everything installed first, then booting with the secondary IDE drive (make sure it's set to slave mode) in order to pull your files.

I say this because when we switched, I stuck the new and old drives in before I installed Windows, and Windows originally thought the new hard drive should be the goddamn F drive. This caused a number of fun problems with sloppily written software that assumed Windows is the C drive, so I had to do a god-awful repair install process to get everything fixed. Not fun, better to do it right the first time.

If you buy from a system builder, this won't be a problem, because they'll install the OS for you, and you can just plug your old hard drive in as a slave drive, at least until you get your old files off.

Also, the 8800 GTS is a very, very nice video card. It's not quite top of the line (that would be the monstrous 8800 GTX), but it'll probably get you where you need to go for the next couple years.

If you're comfortable putting it together yourself, you can get a pretty nice new setup (Core 2 Duo, 8800 GTS, 2 gigs RAM, etc.) for under $1500 USD, and a top of the line setup (8800 GTX, Core 2 Quad, 2-4 gigs RAM) for around $2000 - $2500 USD.

[Azure]

Or if you have money to blow you can buy the 6900...which I saw for a sweet 1400 bucks Canadian a few days ago.

Good thing about it is that all the Intel processors are Socket 775. So if you buy a Socket 775 motherboard, you can easily upgrade to almost any Intel processor.

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

To give a rough idea of the improvement multi-cores will give you, our DB server that handles all of our online games just had a hardware upgrade from dual dual-core Intel procs to dual quad-core procs and we've seen a 50% improvement in processing time for one of our games, and a 33% improvement in processing time for other second big online game. Specifically, we've gone from processing a container from the game in ~4 seconds to ~2, and ~5 to ~3 under heavy load (Friday & Saturday nights).

Now, going from single proc to dual, and then to quad required us to go down in processor speed each time. So, there you go.