Which Processor To Upgrade To???

[rb401]

Hi. Sorry that this is slightly off topic but I value the opinions of the people here! I'm getting a new PC and I've got a choice of 2 chips:-

Intel P4 650 3.4GHz HT 800 2MB or
Intel Pentium D 820 2.8GHz HT 800 2x 1MB (Dual Core Technology).

Its through a work scheme so I can't have my preferred option of another AMD chip Does anyone have any experience with the dual core stuff? Civ IV always seems to run slow for me when I get later in the game (railroad and onwards) - would the dual core processor help this or will the extra 0.6GHz of raw speed be more useful????


Cheers


Rich

 

[Akhenaton]

Civ IV always seems to run slow for me when I get later in the game (railroad and onwards) - would the dual core processor help this or will the extra 0.6GHz of raw speed be more useful????

AFAIK there has not been any word from the dev team whether CivIV has any multithreaded properties (meaning threads that carry actual performance load). I think it would be fairly safe bet to suppose that DC won't speed up CivIV per se, but OTOH latest graphics drivers are multithreaded which take advantage from true multiple execution pipelines (HyperThreading helps a little but not as much as separate HW cores).

I think either CPU will run CivIV nicely and only very high end graphics at medium resolutions could shift the bottleneck to it instead of the graphics subsystem. The performance issue you are now having may be due to just having too little RAM (less than 1GB).

Personally I would recommend DC for mixed and office use with a typical 3 year upgrade cycle today, due to multithreading certainly gaining a lot of ground in the coming years. It makes sense to buy higher speed grade single core if you use it only for high end gaming with a plan to upgrade again within less than 2 years. Then yet OTOH, D 820 may be a bit too on the slow side for single threaded apps. It makes much more sense to select DC as a medium to high performance solution so that it will run even current single threaded apps at high speed (ie. a decision between P4 670 and D 840 or between A64 3800+ and X2 3800+). Relatively slow DC seems to be much more a marketing gimmick than a real good value solution.

Oh and to answer your actual question, higher clock and more cache will be more useful for CivIV and most other games, but like I said, it probably (depending on your graphics) won't make a big difference and DC will be more future proof and useful for other things.

 

[rb401]

cheers for your reply! I think I'm going for the faster single core chip as then I'll know exactly what I'm getting - hopefully when I want to upgrade again the DC technology will be more widely available and more supported by apps


Cheers


Rich

 

[Turambar]

I think I'm going for the faster single core

I am running a dual core Opteron, and really once you go dual core you will never go back. I have been reading Akhenaton's posts and he seems to know what he is talking about, so take the dual core. Civ4 may not multi-threaded now but neither was Quake 4 when it came out, though it is now and Civ4 *could* be multi-threaded as well with just a patch if Firaxis has the desire and programming talent to pull it off. The multi-thread era will be here sooner than you think, and I can feel the difference between one and two cores just in general daily useage when lauching apps, compression, and virus scans especially.

 

[Akhenaton]

I am running a dual core Opteron, and really once you go dual core you will never go back.

I've updated several machines to DC Opterons as well and I do agree that with AMD, especially workstation use, they are the only really viable solution.

However, he has to choose from Pentiums, in which case it's a bit different due to HyperThreading in single core Pentiums. It does actually help a lot in doing what DC does to A64 side of things, which is to smooth out running multiple apps concurrently and switching fast between them. Ofcourse, two real cores are much better, but in A64 there is no HT middle ground to pick from.

Also, OTOH, with early Pentium DC the cores are not IC, but just packaged together and must communicate via the FSB between each other, which eats a lot of performance in multithreaded apps where the threads use lots of common cache. This means that the jump from HT to DC in performance is a lot smaller than from A64 to A64 X2 or Opteron Denmark/Italy.

Basically, you don't want a slow clock Pentium DC, because even if it has 4 "logical processors", running just one thread will be actually a bit slower due to scheduling overheads than with a similar single core without HT enabled, which at 2.8GHz puts it somewhere in line with performance from 2002 (Northwood)!

 

[Turambar]

with early Pentium DC the cores are not IC, but just packaged together and must communicate via the FSB between each other, which eats a lot of performance in multithreaded apps where the threads use lots of common cache. This means that the jump from HT to DC in performance is a lot smaller than from A64 to A64 X2 or Opteron Denmark/Italy.

That was a great explanation. I also forgot the a single core Pentium can have hyperthreading so he would not be missing out completely with multi-threaded apps.