Introduction
Over the last couple of months I have been repeatedly asked a question from people wanting to upgrade or buy a new PC. The question has been, should I get a dual core AMD Athlon 64 or single core and what speed should I get? This has also been a hot topic not only in our forums but right across the internet. Two distinct camps have developed: die hard dual core fans and die hard single core fans. Truthfully, during the testing of this article and my research I have felt like I have been playing Black and White 2 where you have one guy sitting on one shoulder and another on the other, both arguing their cases to me. Neither one are the devil, but neither one comes out as the undisputed angel either. Their is logic behind the arguments put forth from both camps.
The majority of people who have been asking me for advice are gamers. What I have tried to accomplish in this article is a comparison of 3 different CPUs, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 3200+. Let me introduce you to each CPU and explain these choices.
The test set-up
Conclusion
Dual core sounds really cool and it is cool technology. The fact that you have two working cores on the same sized socket as single core is sweet and it's definitely needed to take CPU design to the next level considering how hot modern high MHz CPUs run these days. One of my concerns about the dual core technology is the naming system that AMD have chosen. It confuses people. People read Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and they mentally think of 2 3800+ CPUs. That's not the case at all. It's closer to two Athlon 64 3200+ CPUs in terms of clock speed. Although there are two cores, every game we tested equals the performance of one single core 3200+. FarCry has dual core support but during testing I monitored CPU usage and if 75% of one core was in use, only 25% of the other core was used. So you still have the equivalent of one CPU core sitting there doing nothing.
Almost 3 years ago I built a PC called Black Widow - dual Opterons, 2GB of RAM and all the hottest goodies available at the time. One of my concerns back then was the lack of SMP support in games. I spoke to Tim Willits from id that year at QuakeCon about SMP support which was included for Quake 3 but later removed. It did provide a massive performance increase when they had it working properly. But there weren't many gaming systems out there with dual CPUs and since it was so hard to maintain they dropped the support. Now that dual core is becoming mainstream we may see improvements in performance in games - but when? AMD launched their X2 range almost a year ago and the few games that do claim to support the advantages of dual core, do not provide any performance increase in benchmarking nor in real world subjective tests.
If you are a die hard competitive gamer and every frame per second counts and you want the extra features turned on like AA and shadows then MHz is still king. This may change as the year draws on, but everything I have seen in testing shows that the higher the MHz, the better the fps. So out of the three CPUs I have tested here, the Athlon 64 3800+ is the goer for hardcore competitive gamers.
If you like playing games but you also use your system for other applications like ripping music, video editing, graphics editing, burning CDs etc, I would definitely recommend a dual core over a single core. The performance increase in multi-tasking outweighs the drop in fps. Dual core truly comes to life if you want to play World of War Craft whilst chatting on Teamspeak and ripping a DVD all at the same time. Windows is quite capable of allocating the appropriate applications to each core to spread the workload.
I was surprised to see just how competitive the Athlon 64 3200+ was next to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in gaming. If you are on a budget then the 3200 is a great deal since it is over $100 cheaper than the X2 3800+. If you are concerned with future proofing your system for applications and games that will use dual core technology, save your $100 now and put it into a dual core CPU next year when prices have fallen through the floor and we will probably all find lovely whopping 4600+ X2s at today's 3800+ prices! Even if you put that $100 you saved into extra RAM, you would see a greater performance increase right now that putting that money into dual core right now.
So what's the best choice? It depends on
1) your primary use for your PC
2) whether or not you multi-task a lot and
3) your budget.
I wonder if this conclusion would be any different if we overclocked the 3200+? I feel some more testing coming on....
For the complete review visit ViaArena
Over the last couple of months I have been repeatedly asked a question from people wanting to upgrade or buy a new PC. The question has been, should I get a dual core AMD Athlon 64 or single core and what speed should I get? This has also been a hot topic not only in our forums but right across the internet. Two distinct camps have developed: die hard dual core fans and die hard single core fans. Truthfully, during the testing of this article and my research I have felt like I have been playing Black and White 2 where you have one guy sitting on one shoulder and another on the other, both arguing their cases to me. Neither one are the devil, but neither one comes out as the undisputed angel either. Their is logic behind the arguments put forth from both camps.
The majority of people who have been asking me for advice are gamers. What I have tried to accomplish in this article is a comparison of 3 different CPUs, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 3200+. Let me introduce you to each CPU and explain these choices.
The test set-up
- CPU: Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 3200+
- RAM: 2 x 512MB modules (total 1GB) Corsair XMS Expert PC 3200
- HDD: Western Digital Raptor 36GB, 10 000rpm
- Video card: Nvidia 7800 GT PCI Express
- Mainboard: Asus A8V-VM
Conclusion
Dual core sounds really cool and it is cool technology. The fact that you have two working cores on the same sized socket as single core is sweet and it's definitely needed to take CPU design to the next level considering how hot modern high MHz CPUs run these days. One of my concerns about the dual core technology is the naming system that AMD have chosen. It confuses people. People read Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and they mentally think of 2 3800+ CPUs. That's not the case at all. It's closer to two Athlon 64 3200+ CPUs in terms of clock speed. Although there are two cores, every game we tested equals the performance of one single core 3200+. FarCry has dual core support but during testing I monitored CPU usage and if 75% of one core was in use, only 25% of the other core was used. So you still have the equivalent of one CPU core sitting there doing nothing.
Almost 3 years ago I built a PC called Black Widow - dual Opterons, 2GB of RAM and all the hottest goodies available at the time. One of my concerns back then was the lack of SMP support in games. I spoke to Tim Willits from id that year at QuakeCon about SMP support which was included for Quake 3 but later removed. It did provide a massive performance increase when they had it working properly. But there weren't many gaming systems out there with dual CPUs and since it was so hard to maintain they dropped the support. Now that dual core is becoming mainstream we may see improvements in performance in games - but when? AMD launched their X2 range almost a year ago and the few games that do claim to support the advantages of dual core, do not provide any performance increase in benchmarking nor in real world subjective tests.
If you are a die hard competitive gamer and every frame per second counts and you want the extra features turned on like AA and shadows then MHz is still king. This may change as the year draws on, but everything I have seen in testing shows that the higher the MHz, the better the fps. So out of the three CPUs I have tested here, the Athlon 64 3800+ is the goer for hardcore competitive gamers.
If you like playing games but you also use your system for other applications like ripping music, video editing, graphics editing, burning CDs etc, I would definitely recommend a dual core over a single core. The performance increase in multi-tasking outweighs the drop in fps. Dual core truly comes to life if you want to play World of War Craft whilst chatting on Teamspeak and ripping a DVD all at the same time. Windows is quite capable of allocating the appropriate applications to each core to spread the workload.
I was surprised to see just how competitive the Athlon 64 3200+ was next to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in gaming. If you are on a budget then the 3200 is a great deal since it is over $100 cheaper than the X2 3800+. If you are concerned with future proofing your system for applications and games that will use dual core technology, save your $100 now and put it into a dual core CPU next year when prices have fallen through the floor and we will probably all find lovely whopping 4600+ X2s at today's 3800+ prices! Even if you put that $100 you saved into extra RAM, you would see a greater performance increase right now that putting that money into dual core right now.
So what's the best choice? It depends on
1) your primary use for your PC
2) whether or not you multi-task a lot and
3) your budget.
I wonder if this conclusion would be any different if we overclocked the 3200+? I feel some more testing coming on....
For the complete review visit ViaArena