Upgrading my computer -- Need parts list/recommendations
- Thread starter the100thballoon
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the100thballoon
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good to knowSpeedo said:
BriantheBold
Chieftain
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Speedo regarding your comment on Dell LCD's being overpriced I would agree with you on the 24 inch model but not on smaller sizes. I purchased the 2005FPW 20 inch monitor on a Thanksgiving holiday special for around $420. 20 inches for $420!!! That is an unheard of price for all other manufacturers EXCEPT the Samsung Syncmaster 915N 19 inch which is a far inferior monitor with frequent graphical defects and jaggies, a slower refresh rate, and a lower maximum resolution. I PLAY CIV IV ON THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION THE GAME OFFERS... 1680x1050!!!
Well, if you look around and wait for specials you can pick up good deals, but not generally. Btw, Newegg has a lot of refurbished 204T's like mine for $440.
Surely it offers 1600x1200? Either way, I'm not a fan of widescreen for computer use/games.
DaEezT
Civ, Pizza, Spam, Repeat
Speedo said:
I strongly disagree with you on that one. While it is true that single core CPUs (especially the Athlon64 FX) are currently still better for gaming (at elast performance/$ wise) it won't be that way for much longer.
ATI added dual core optimization with their 5.12 drivers which lead to a perfomance incerase and that's just the gfx drivers.
It also took a while for the game developers to embrace 64 bit but last week Valve released their 64bit HL2 port and some other games (FarCry & UT) have gotten 64bit patches already too.
Dual core CPUs are here to stay and it's just a matter of time until game developers start releasing dual core patches that boost performance.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I expect it to be several years before you truly see benefits from dual core (though it is worth nothing that in my testing I've found that dualcore provides almost a 40% performance increase if you happen to use onboard sound). After all, they still really have to figure out how to do SMP game programming. If you go out and count the games now that are even slightly SMP aware, you won't use more than one hand.. there's a reason for that.
Yep, and while I don't pay much attention to ATI, nVidia's addition of dualcore "optimizations" in the Forceware 80.xx series is giving a lot of people headaches. Though for some reason I've been free from the vast majority of them.
I don't know about HL2, I'm not even sure if it's out yet, I just read about it this morning, but so far none of the 64bit editions of games have really added anything worthwhile. Well, FarCry 64bit added stuff, but that stuff had nothing to do with 64bit. At this point, the most attractive feature of 64bit is the ability to address > 4GB of memory... and games are nowhere near needing that much.
DaEezT
Civ, Pizza, Spam, Repeat
Speedo said:
Let's add Quake 4 to the dual vs sigle core fray then
http://www.idsoftware.com/ :
and a benchmark
Threading, which is the basis for parallelism, has been around for ages. Civ4 runs 12 threads and even Deus Ex (the old one from 2000) runs 10 threads. You don't have to write applications/games SMP specific, you just need independant threads.
The way AMD and Intel are pushing their dual core CPUs I'd say that the majority of the big games will see some dual core improvements during the next year.
Yes, I forgot about that, and I've seen plenty of test results with it.
Truthfully, it adds nothing to the game. So you can say that your game runs at 160 fps rather than 95fps (not really though, since that testing is done in situations to put the load on the CPU)... yay! You'll never notice the difference, and you'll never see those kinds of numbers with the resolutions and setting that most people run... 'cause then, the graphics card becomes the limiting factor. In fact, with a good graphics card you really only need a Athlon 3000 or 3200 to get full performance out of most games.
There will be no real benefit from dualcore until the start doing things like adding physics calculations which can take advantage of the second core.
Everything runs mulitple threads. In fact, the average application probably has 10 threads, and at any given time your PC is probably dealing with 400-500 threads, or more.
The bottom line is, the benefit from dual core in gaming there is negligible. BF2 is one of the only games I've tested much with dualcore vs single core, and there the dualcore benefit was 2 fps: 61 fps vs 63 fps. I have plenty of other games I can test it with if you need more proof.
DaEezT
Civ, Pizza, Spam, Repeat
I agree with you again (to a certain degree 
).
Right now dual core performance isn't up to it's full potential and (as I said earlier) that it's a question of performance/$.
But I stick to my claim that that'll change in 2006. How long have dual core CPUs really been on the market now? 9 months? And already ATI and Quake 4 give us a glimpse at the possibilites. Unlike 64bit you don't need a new OS to profit from it (or don't profit as you rightly pointed out) and the developers don't have anything to lose by increasing the amount of parallelism in their games.
You mentioned physics. That's nice because HL2 will be one of the games to see a dual core patch in 2006. I also predict F.E.A.R, SS2, FarCry and BF2 to make a move for it.
As for non GFX heavy games.. well, a 16 AI Civ 3/4 game doesn't take long between turns because my GFX card isn't up to it, so we just might see some other games getting some dual core attention in 2006
Rest asure that it'll take more than 2 hands to count the games by this time next year.
So it all comes down to the question: How long are you planning to use that machine?
If the answer is 2-3 years (mine is a bit over 2.5 years old and still doing an ok job) then I'd go dual core. If you want the best short term perfomance go single and replace the CPU in a year or so.
Either way dual core is the future, and the near future at that.
).Right now dual core performance isn't up to it's full potential and (as I said earlier) that it's a question of performance/$.
But I stick to my claim that that'll change in 2006. How long have dual core CPUs really been on the market now? 9 months? And already ATI and Quake 4 give us a glimpse at the possibilites. Unlike 64bit you don't need a new OS to profit from it (or don't profit as you rightly pointed out) and the developers don't have anything to lose by increasing the amount of parallelism in their games.
You mentioned physics. That's nice because HL2 will be one of the games to see a dual core patch in 2006. I also predict F.E.A.R, SS2, FarCry and BF2 to make a move for it.
As for non GFX heavy games.. well, a 16 AI Civ 3/4 game doesn't take long between turns because my GFX card isn't up to it, so we just might see some other games getting some dual core attention in 2006
Rest asure that it'll take more than 2 hands to count the games by this time next year.
So it all comes down to the question: How long are you planning to use that machine?
If the answer is 2-3 years (mine is a bit over 2.5 years old and still doing an ok job) then I'd go dual core. If you want the best short term perfomance go single and replace the CPU in a year or so.
Either way dual core is the future, and the near future at that.
I would say that, if you're worried about it, buying a single core now and upgrading the CPU if there starts to be a real benefit from dualcore is a very viable option.
Once M2 is solidly on the market, I expect that the prices of Socket 939 Athlon64/x2 CPUs to start dropping significantly. By this time next year the price of the 4400 and 4800 will probably have dropped 50%, methinks.
DaEezT
Civ, Pizza, Spam, Repeat
Ye, I myself am waiting for the M2 (or AM2 as rumors claim) for my new PC but I'm also in conflict with myself whether to go AM2 (expensive) or old 939 (cheaper but somewhat "dead end"). Maybe I'll post a topic here in 7 months or so and we can argue about my PC
Littel OT:
A "normal" (let's not argue about a definition for normal here
) game system imo also includes things like voice com software (e.g. ventrilo) / desktop firewall / virus scanner / instant messanger or chat program / misc programs (like harware monitor, HL server watch etc) that run in background while you are playing. So far none of the big benchmark sites did a single/dual comparison with and without a number of such programs being active during the game.
Littel OT:
Could you do a single vs dual benchmark with background apps?Speedo said:
A "normal" (let's not argue about a definition for normal here
) game system imo also includes things like voice com software (e.g. ventrilo) / desktop firewall / virus scanner / instant messanger or chat program / misc programs (like harware monitor, HL server watch etc) that run in background while you are playing. So far none of the big benchmark sites did a single/dual comparison with and without a number of such programs being active during the game. I wouldn't really call S939 a "dead end."
From what I've seen of the roadmap for M2, they will be basically rereleasing the current higher end models of the A64 and X2 lines (not FX though), just with the DDR2 support. The only new chips I recall is a faster dualcore (5200) and a transitioning of the FX line to dualcore (FX-61). They may release one of those in S939 though. I've kept hearing there would be one more CPU released after the x2 3800 but before M2... and those Q4 numbers I posted earlier were from a friend of mine (who works with one of the hardware review sites) testing with an "AMD dualcore chip faster than the 4800 which is still under NDA." It would pretty much have to be a S939 design, then. And I wouldn't worry to much about the DDR/DDR2 difference. My gut feeling is that there won't be an extreme amount of performance gain simply by switching to DDR2. Besides, it wouldn't surprise me if AMD skipped right on to DDR3 within a year or two
Sure
My numbers from BF2 were with Norton AV running in the background (not actually running a scan, of course, just doing its normal thing). I doubt there will be a very significant difference since most of those programs have such low overhead anyway... but we'll see for sure.
the100thballoon
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@Speedo
...and the results?
...and the results?
Well, I haven't had time to do a test exactly like requested, since that would really require me to completely start over with one of my flight sims to use all the background stuff you actually have running while playing. So, I just threw together a quick, non-realistic test of BF2 (since I already have results from it with no loads from previous testing) with the following running, in addition to normal processes:
Folding@Home (1 instance)
Opera
Thunderbird
Internet Download Manager (downloading)
Limewire (downloading)
Winamp (playing, not idle)
That may not be quite as heavy a load is it seems at first glance, as Folding@Home does a pretty good job of getting out of the way when there's a load on the CPU. Still, it should be much more load than your average voice comms, IM, or etc.
1600x1200:
Game alone: 63 fps
w/ additional load: 65 fps
I didn't quite believe that, so I retested at 800x600 (lowest res BF2 will run at) to put more load on the CPU:
Game alone: 69 fps
w/ additional load: 61 fps
I didn't bother trying that on a single core, but I can this weekend if you really want it.
Scores on a single core though, with game alone-
1600x1200: 61 fps
800x600: 64 fps
Folding@Home (1 instance)
Opera
Thunderbird
Internet Download Manager (downloading)
Limewire (downloading)
Winamp (playing, not idle)
That may not be quite as heavy a load is it seems at first glance, as Folding@Home does a pretty good job of getting out of the way when there's a load on the CPU. Still, it should be much more load than your average voice comms, IM, or etc.
1600x1200:
Game alone: 63 fps
w/ additional load: 65 fps
I didn't quite believe that, so I retested at 800x600 (lowest res BF2 will run at) to put more load on the CPU:
Game alone: 69 fps
w/ additional load: 61 fps
I didn't bother trying that on a single core, but I can this weekend if you really want it.
Scores on a single core though, with game alone-
1600x1200: 61 fps
800x600: 64 fps
