For gaming, how do I make the most out of a X2 CPU?

I have read some posts about setting the affinity of one CPU for a game and the other CPU for everything else? Is this BS? But if a game does not take atvantege of a dual core CPU, like NWN2, etc., is there a way to get more out of your system? I have the AMD drivers installed.

what about overclocking?

Even with single threaded games (and other apps), you will still see some benefit because your second core will be handling all of your other processing needs (e.g. OS, services, anti-virus etc).

There are several things you can do. Setting affinity only tells that app what CPU to use.

SLI or XFire would give you bette scores, but your clock seems to be at about 2.8GHz so you are at the limit of the CPU. Perhaps an X1950 or 7950GT OC would do well, but you may want to wait for 8800 and R600.

ANother idea maybe to go to X64 Pro, which is more efficient with memory (though the overhead is higher). It supports NUMA (non uniform memory access) which keeps the RAM data closer to the executing CPU.


A new GPU, though, is your best bet.

I think this is what you read about

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processor [...] 18,00.html