Processor Question

mulldoonuk

I currently have a..

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ 2.41 GHz

say i were wanting to buy a processor double the power/speed of this...

what would i be looking for?

btw..

Would prefer to stick with AMD

so don't suggest i move over to the darkside.

Thanks

HappyIdiotTalk

So you're an AMD man are you? Every decent computer I've owned over the last decade has been AMD powered... They were the best value for money processors you could buy by far...

However, thats all gone now and Intel is where you should be investing your money. Intel are wiping the floor with AMD at the moment and if you want to make the most of your investment you should get yourself a nice Q6600 like all the other cool kids. Or if you have the money an i7 would be even better... but you need to upgrade the mobo and memory to get one of those too.

Be loyal to price/power not brand!

epz_2

agreed, the i7 is clock for clock 30% faster than the core2s in many apps and the duos beat amd.

the problem i have with i7s are the motherboards cost so much, frankly its not much more to get a dual xeon x5500 board and then you have an upgrde path to a rig potentially with two cpus 16 cores and 32 threads once the 8core xeons ship.


ot but what you doing that needs the horsepower, a good gpu and cuda/opencl may solve a lot of issues.

basmic

If you can afford it, go for i7.

I upgraded recently, and as a gamer I surprising opted to go for a Core 2 dual core 3GHz processor with 6MB of cache. But I'd never use all four cores in all honesty, therefore I opted for raw speed. As of yet, the processor has yet to disappoint me. Using ConvertXtoDVD, I can convert a 120 minute AVI file in about 22 minutes. A quad core running at 2.4GHz would be slower, however it can run more intensive tasks at once - something I don't really do.

Also bear in mind that four cores will draw more power than two cores - so keep this in mind, when purchasing.

HappyIdiotTalk

They DUO's are good aren't they. I'm a gamer too and do one big upgrade a year - either graphics card or processor (and mobo and ram if needed). Last year was a processor year, and as it happens I was running the exact same processor as the OP, but decided to give the Q66000 quad core a try to see what all the fuss was about instead of upgrading to a Phenom.

Because my AMD only ever used about 60-70% of its capacity while gaming I wasn't expecting much of a boost with the Q6600, but by golly was I surprised. The performance boost has really amazed me, it has been very noticeable indeed, its staggeringly good.

This year is a graphics card year, but I've read so many good things about the i7's that I want to upgrade to one of those too. I've been made redundant so cant afford either at the moment, but if I get another job quickly I'm definately going to consider blowing a bit of my redundancy money on an i7 and associated kit.

BTW I have SETi@Home running while I'm not using the computer so more cores means more work units processed!

mulldoonuk

basmic wrote: »

If you can afford it, go for i7.

I upgraded recently, and as a gamer I surprising opted to go for a Core 2 dual core 3GHz processor with 6MB of cache. But I'd never use all four cores in all honesty, therefore I opted for raw speed. As of yet, the processor has yet to disappoint me. Using ConvertXtoDVD, I can convert a 120 minute AVI file in about 22 minutes. A quad core running at 2.4GHz would be slower, however it can run more intensive tasks at once - something I don't really do.

Also bear in mind that four cores will draw more power than two cores - so keep this in mind, when purchasing.

I'am not a Gamer..

but getting "into" a lot of video encoding/converting myself...
hence my original post.
Reading these replies the general opinion is go over to the darkside :eek:
however..

this is my Motherboard...

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=ALIVENF6G-DVI

would it be possible to just upgrade the cpu?

gaming_guy

mulldoonuk wrote: »

would it be possible to just upgrade the cpu?

no, you would need a new motherboard as that will only support AMD socket AM2 processors, where as intel use socket 775 (?) and a different one for core i7's, but i can't remember the name of it

mulldoonuk

gaming_guy wrote: »

no, you would need a new motherboard as that will only support AMD socket AM2 processors, where as intel use socket 775 (?) and a different one for core i7's, but i can't remember the name of it

So...going by basmics post..
and speed being my priority..
it would be better to buy a powerful dual core pc than a less powerful Quad core one?

gaming_guy

well i have a phenom quad here and its quite fast running ubuntu 64bit, however windows xp 32bit is slow at bootup (probably due to all the crap i have loading at startup )

but when i had the 3ghz athlon dual core, it seemed slower to me probably because it had vista on it

weegie.geek

mulldoonuk wrote: »

So...going by basmics post..
and speed being my priority..
it would be better to buy a powerful dual core pc than a less powerful Quad core one?

Depends what you're going to be using it for. Some apps and games will utilise 4 cores, so 4 2ghz cores will run better than two 3ghz cores, but for apps that will only take advantage of one or two cores, the speed of the individual cores is more important than the number of cores.

spakkker

mulldoonuk I'm not a gamer but I don't think any games use quad core fully so as basmic did get a dual core.
I have e5200 currently at 3.7ghz and am running orthos too , as I type , my last e5200 needed loads of volts and was not stable over 3.6
You only need cpu, m/board, ddr2?, maybe psu.
Convertxtodvd takes between 12 and 20 mins usually for a movie avi