Cores VS Speed

[Forte125]

Something I have been wondering...

...I have an overclocked Anthalon 64 X2 in my rig, which has a higher clock speed than the Phenom I was going to replace it with. FOR GAMING, is it better to have 2 cores running at a high speed or 4 slower cores.

That anthalon can max most games (along with my 5850) on the market today, except Crysis. I am upgrading this computer to run Crysis 2 when it hits...

 

[Scotteq]

Clock speed is not an absolute figure: More to the point is how many Instructions Per Clock the processor is able to perform. Newer architectures can have more than 1 instruction in the pipeline.

If you want to compare your potential list of processors, please feel free to use the relevant benchmark or game in the link below. That will give you a more definitive answer.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/benchmarks,60.html



Now: One thing you may want to also consider is how well (Crysis 2) supports multithreading and multi core architectures. I haven't seen any "real" invormation, just conjecture; but this is an area the developers should be able to exploit in order to realize the greatest gains.

 

[sturm]

Depends on both in a way. If the program/game is multi-threaded and made to use more than 2 cores than a quad core might be faster. If it's not multi-threaded or maybe only written for 2 cores than the higher clocked dual core would be better.

Overall graphic cards play a bigger part in gaming than cpu., to a point.

 

[WR2]

When you start talking about multi-card graphics configurations or especially CPU-intensive multi-threaded game titles (like RPGs) you can start to see bigger differences in dual vs tri vs quad core CPUs.

Scotteq is right; you'll want to see good, hard information on how Crysis 2 performs on different hardware before you jump on any upgrades.

 

[FALC0N]

Something I have been wondering...

...I have an overclocked Anthalon 64 X2 in my rig, which has a higher clock speed than the Phenom I was going to replace it with. FOR GAMING, is it better to have 2 cores running at a high speed or 4 slower cores.

That anthalon can max most games (along with my 5850) on the market today, except Crysis. I am upgrading this computer to run Crysis 2 when it hits...

Im not familiar with the Anthalon processor