help with new processor

[juanes287]

i am going to buy a new proc in the next few days, but while i was looking around i came up with a few questions. my two choices came down to the
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core and the
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ ClawHammer 1GHz FSB Socket 939, both of these processors are $400, so my question is should i get the Athlon 64 4000 or the x2?

i plan to do mostly gaming

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Personally, I say stay single core for now. But others will disagree of course.

 

[pmr]

i am going to buy a new proc in the next few days, but while i was looking around i came up with a few questions. my two choices came down to the
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core and the
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ ClawHammer 1GHz FSB Socket 939, both of these processors are $400, so my question is should i get the Athlon 64 4000 or the x2?

i plan to do mostly gaming

Gaming? 4000+
I´d wait till new socket is available, spending $400 can be problematic for your wallet and brain. But with the new socket arriving=spend $ in new mobo...you choose, it's your wallet...

 

[Guest]

Gaming? 4000+
I´d wait till new socket is available, spending $400 can be problematic for your wallet and brain. But with the new socket arriving=spend $ in new mobo...you choose, it's your wallet...

Well of course everyone will have their own opinion on this, so here's mine: Modern gaming PCs are not bottlenecked by the CPU speed, and so even thogh the 4000+ is a faster core then one of the 4200+'s cores, you'll see little benefit in fps in games - your GPU will have far more say in that.

However, multitasking in windows (or Linux) will be far superior on an X2 system. Overall you'll get a zippier response in every day tasks such as surfing, virus scanning, email, ripping music, etc all concurrently.

Plus 2006 is the year that games will be released that will take advantage of multicore chips, so that is an added benefit.

That's the way I see it --> go with the 4200+.

BTW, M2 socket will offer DDR2 over DDR, but will that really make any huge difference in performance? Initial reports are no...so even with M2 coming out this summer, S939 will stay around for quite some time I'd imagine.

I'm planning on buying a system next week with the X2 4200+...with plans for a future upgrade to an FX-60 in two years, once M2 is mainstream and S939 can be had for cheap

 

[slvr_phoenix]

BTW, M2 socket will offer DDR2 over DDR, but will that really make any huge difference in performance?

It'll probably make it slower. I'd still take DDR over DDR2. But at least DDR2's latencies have improved a lot by now.

 

[RichPLS]

Games benefit from dual core when any one of these factors apply...have more than one applying, benefits are greater!!!

Game is multi-threaded...
IE...
Call of Duty 2
City of Villains
F.E.A.R.
World of Warcraft
Age of Empires III
Black & White 2
Peter Jackson’s King Kong
The Movies
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2: Special Forces
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Quake 4
Vangauard Saga of Heros

the list is ever growing also...

or

Video Card driver is multi-threaded... IE, ATI and nVidia...


or

Gamer is running background services while gaming... IE, Anti-Virus S/W, S/W firewalls, downloading torrents, etc...other core can handle these processes while devoting main core to gaming...