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I'm gonna build me a midrange gaming pc. I've heard that not many games take advantage of more than two cores. Is this true? Would it be a waste of money to buy a triple or quad core CPU?

The CPU market is a bit of a minefield at the moment. It's always guessing how quickly developers will start using the fancy new features on the new generation of CPUs. So far, they've been lazy gits. Dual core gaming is still a small minority let alone quad core gaming and while enough games have "dual core" as minimum or recommended, this is more due to the CPU's architecture than because the game actually employs both cores.

I'd say, go for a dual core with as much Ghz as possible and you'll be fine.

I agree with Icarus. Unless things have changed the only games I've seen that use even 3 cores are RTS (Supreme Commander, most notably). Even Crysis doesn't show much improvement going from Dual to Quad.

That said, are you going to be doing any video encoding or anything?
Also, I haven't compared prices lately, last time was over a year ago when I built my current PC, and then the jump up to quad was a pretty steep transition. It may have changed.

EDIT: Looking at a recent [H]ardOCP article, they suggest going triple or quad core if you can get a processor over 3.0Ghz, preferrably 3.6Ghz or better. Not sure how that lines up with your budget. Especially since they're pretty demanding over at [H], and advise mainly for high end systems.

figmentPez said:

That said, are you going to be doing any video encoding or anything?

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A little bit of video editing, but mostly it'll be for gaming.

They just installed a bunch of dual-quad core set ups in my office....they're so massive.
But the only purpose is exceedingly past gaming.

I have a quad core in my computer, and basically it's completely under-used.

While it is technically true that most games only use the single proc, or core, similar to SMP, there are advantages to the extra cores. Namely, they can run system tasks in the background while you game, making your apps run smoother. Also, there is a lot to be said for future proofing if you gots the cash. I say, get the best you can reasonably afford, you won't regret it.

Well it's hard to even find dual cores anymore, I think tiger direct only sells 2 different Core 2 Duo's anymore... the Core 2 Quad cores are about the same price as the dual core now so might as well go with it.

3 Ghz Dual core runs about $170, 3 Ghz quad runs $300 to $500. Dual cores aren't hard to find.

Given a sum of money, a faster dual core will be better for your particular application than a slower quad core.

If they are the same speed, then go for the quad core.

-Adam

One thing to consider would be when you expect to do your next upgrade after this? Because although game don't currently take much advantage of quad cores, the next year or so should see a few engines begin to appear that will. And at that point they might start making a MASSIVE difference. So if you think you'll upgrade again in less than 2 years, go dual core, make the most of it now and move to quad only when you need to.

But if you think this system might last 3 or 4? I'd say get a quad, that way you ensure that you can get some of the grunt out of the newer game engines, some of which might not even make the slightest bit of difference moving from 1 to 2, but explode in fanciness going from 1/2 to 4.

Of course, I'd also recommend looking into expected dates for some multi-core game engines, since I'm mostly pulling those periods out of my ass.

Mr_Chaz said:

And at that point they might start making a MASSIVE difference.

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Might make a massive difference. There has yet to be a single game where they make such a huge difference, and only a few where they even make a significant difference. It's hard to predict the future. Will truly multi-threaded games make enough difference for it to be worth paying more for a quad core processor with a slower core speed than a dual core? I don't think anyone can answer that question right now with specifics. Generalities, sure, but not enough to decide for certain which is better for every budget range.

What is your budget, anyway, TwoBit?

I'm with Chaz here. If it's a long term machine, go quad. If not, just go for a dual.

figmentPez said:

Mr_Chaz said:

And at that point they might start making a MASSIVE difference.

Click to expand...

Might make a massive difference. There has yet to be a single game where they make such a huge difference, and only a few where they even make a significant difference. It's hard to predict the future. Will truly multi-threaded games make enough difference for it to be worth paying more for a quad core processor with a slower core speed than a dual core? I don't think anyone can answer that question right now with specifics. Generalities, sure, but not enough to decide for certain which is better for every budget range.

What is your budget, anyway, TwoBit?

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Multicores will ony really become important to gaming when there's a multi-core gaming console. Since so many games are ports or based on engines that also need to run on those crappy consoles,.... yeah.

-- di jul 28, 2009 12:27 am --

figmentPez said:

Mr_Chaz said:

And at that point they might start making a MASSIVE difference.

Click to expand...

Might make a massive difference. There has yet to be a single game where they make such a huge difference, and only a few where they even make a significant difference. It's hard to predict the future. Will truly multi-threaded games make enough difference for it to be worth paying more for a quad core processor with a slower core speed than a dual core? I don't think anyone can answer that question right now with specifics. Generalities, sure, but not enough to decide for certain which is better for every budget range.

What is your budget, anyway, TwoBit?

Click to expand...

Multicores will ony really become important to gaming when there's a multi-core gaming console. Since so many games are ports or based on engines that also need to run on those crappy consoles,.... yeah.

Bubble181 said:

Multicores will ony really become important to gaming when there's a multi-core gaming console. Since so many games are ports or based on engines that also need to run on those crappy consoles,.... yeah.

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I'm pretty sure both the 360 and the PS3 have multiple cores. I think the 360 has 3 cores and the PS3 has more... Okay, I checked. The Xbox 360 does have a triple core processor, while the PS3 has a stranger architecture that's harder to pin down (part single core, part 7-core, hard to program thing)

Despite that, I haven't heard anything about console ports doing any better on quad-core chips than native PC games.

Would you mind posting the setup you have at the moment? I'm looking myself to make a low to midrange gaming comp mainly for futureproofing than a desire a to run anything really graphics intensive aside from wow and maybe a couple other games.

The PS3 has a Cell processor, which is a single big processor based on the POWER architecture (That's 'Power' as in PowerPC, the same lineage as G3/G4/G5 Macintosh) for the mundane stuff with 8* specialized coprocessors alongside it. The main processor does traditional CPU duties, and the extra coprocessors do the sorts of 'streaming' things that are being explored by technologies such as OpenCL, CUDA, ATI Stream, etc.

For today's games, look at clock speed and get the chip with the highest clock speed. Right now, the number of cores doesn't matter, it's the clock speed that matters. The chip to beat right now for gaming is the Core i7 870 (with the Core i7 860 running a close second for budget-minded folks). Q1 2010 might even bring a faster Core i5 2-core chip but the model number has not yet been determined (sources for previous). If you have the choice between Core 2 (Conroe) and Core i5/i7 (Lynnfield), go for the second. The i5/i7 chips get a lot more work done clock-for-clock compared to the Conroe chips, enough that a 2.8GHz Lynnfield can probably perform on par with a 3.6GHz Conroe, especially if that Lynnfield chip is one of the ones that auto-overclocks.

Of course, if you wait for the 'best' to come out, you'll be waiting forever. Keep in mind that this is being posted by a guy whose best (Windows) computer is currently an AGP dual 1.4GHz PIII with a Quadro FX4000 (GeForce6800 Ultra)...absolute state of the art/top of the line for 2003, not so much nowadays.

--Patrick

*Only 7 are enabled**. Sony buys chips that may or may not have one bad unit so they are guaranteed larger volume.
**Only 6 are available for developers to use, the 7th is reserved for use by the PS3 OS.

Here's an interesting question.

I've got an i7 940. Is there a way to "make a core focus on something" in particular? Like running WoW or games off one core/two cores for optimal performance?

HoboNinja said:

Well it's hard to even find dual cores anymore, I think tiger direct only sells 2 different Core 2 Duo's anymore... the Core 2 Quad cores are about the same price as the dual core now so might as well go with it.

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ummmmmmmm

que?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... %202%20Duo

Dual cores are still really the kings of gaming. Speed/core/dollar ratio is so much better than for quad cores, who see almost no performance increase against similarly clocked dual cores. And the price of a similarly clocked quad core is sooooo much higher.

However.......

the i7 architecture is here to stay, and that only has quad cores. So, if you are building a rig and want to have it for a long time, pick yourself up an i7 quad core. Even though a higher end C2D can outperform it, the i7 socket (socket B) is the way to go for a long term investment.

Shegokigo said:

Is there a way to \"make a core focus on something\" in particular? Like running WoW or games off one core/two cores for optimal performance?

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You can set core affinity, but it means doing some testing and tuning. It might also make better sense to turn off Hyper-threading in the BIOS if you're going to do this. Logical processors are never as good as physical ones, and it will keep down confusion as well (since when you see the list drop from 8 to 4, you'll know that all the cores you see are physical).

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

What is your budget, anyway, TwoBit?

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A little over a thousand bucks.

Skinny Santa said:

Would you mind posting the setup you have at the moment? I'm looking myself to make a low to midrange gaming comp mainly for futureproofing than a desire a to run anything really graphics intensive aside from wow and maybe a couple other games.

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Here's a preliminary list of specs I put together:

AMD Phenom II X2 550
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P
Radeon HD 4870
Western Digital 1 TB HDD
Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
Antec Three Hundred Case

PatrThom said:

Shegokigo said:

Is there a way to \"make a core focus on something\" in particular? Like running WoW or games off one core/two cores for optimal performance?

Click to expand...

You can set core affinity, but it means doing some testing and tuning. It might also make better sense to turn off Hyper-threading in the BIOS if you're going to do this. Logical processors are never as good as physical ones, and it will keep down confusion as well (since when you see the list drop from 8 to 4, you'll know that all the cores you see are physical).

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Use programs such as WinAFC if you want your affinities to be permanent rather then having to set them every single time for every program.