AMD Phenom II Quad-Core better than the Athlon II Dual-Core?

snowzsan

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Jun 9, 2011
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Recently I purchased an Athlon II Dual-Core Mobile CPU (S1G4) @ 2.1GHz to replace the AMD V120 that came with my laptop. After dinking around with it for a bit and what not I noticed no noticeable difference between the two (as I had already expected). Now I'm looking into the AMD Phenom II Quad-Core Mobile CPU (S1G4) @1.6GHz and I have to ask, is it worth it? Honestly because I couldn't imagine the quad-core running at a low frequency better than the dual-core running higher. However there is the benefit of 4 seperate processors to 2. Would an upgrade really be worth it? This station is used for med-level gaming such as Minecraft, Starcraft 2, Empire Earth, 9Dragons, etc. I'm not into the whole video thing so programs like Photoshop and other editing programs don't matter to me. For gaming, would it be worth it?

Also, I figured I should add this is! Since I purchased the Athlon II, it shows two seperate graphs in the task manager (Windows 7 Home Premium x64) but I'm still wondering whether or not both cores are actually being recognized. Is there any way to ensure this? Sites like Can U Run It? and others of the same nature don't recognize my CPU during test but they did recognized the AMD V120. I'm just wanting to make sure that there isn't any issues.

Thanks in advance!
 
from what you're describing i doubt you'd see an increase in performance. In my experience quad cores are only good for serious multi-tasking because most programs don't know what to do with more than one core anyways.
 
The one upside is that if you were running stuff in the background (music, downloads, maybe.) you probably wouldn't see the performance drop you would with a dual core on a quad, but that's pretty specific and you'd have to be doing something fairly serious to notice it anyways.