Thinking about building a computer around the Athlon II x3 440

Drenlin said:
No acc? That's odd...athlon it is then.
Click to expand...

Alot of microatx boards don't have acc on them, ive run into a couple 785 boards from asus and gigabyte without it as well. Mostly due to what i would assume is heat from the cpu vrms, but something like this board should be fine(its only a 4 phase pwm, but they are above average quality and have pretty substantial cooling, the heatsinks on the board i have running an athlon II X3 slightly oc'ed to 3.2Ghz barely hits 35c).
 
I knew it was fairly common on lower end boards, but I didn't expect a board with features and pricing like this one to lack it...ah well.

I was thinking though...wouldn't the cache on the Phenom make up for the lack of a core? I don't know how the newer architectures are, but when I moved from a Northwood Celeron to a Northwood P4, both 2.8GHz, it nearly doubled the performance due having quadruple the cache size, or at least in benchmarks. Would the effects not be similar with the Phenom? Obviously the performance won't double, but it seems like it'd at least make up for the missing core...
 
Drenlin said:
I knew it was fairly common on lower end boards, but I didn't expect a board with features and pricing like this one to lack it...ah well.

I was thinking though...wouldn't the cache on the Phenom make up for the lack of a core? I don't know how the newer architectures are, but when I moved from a Northwood Celeron to a Northwood P4, both 2.8GHz, it nearly doubled the performance due having quadruple the cache size, or at least in benchmarks. Would the effects not be similar with the Phenom? Obviously the performance won't double, but it seems like it'd at least make up for the missing core...
Click to expand...
The cache is substantial, but the overall processing power slightly edges to the Athlon II X4. Back in the northwood days though, P4's needed the cache because of how terribly ineffecient they were(had a reallly long pipeline, prescott was like 32 or 33 stages IIRC).
 
Starcraft 2 needs a pentium 4 at minimum, is what i heard... along with other old hardware. doesn't look like it will be groundbreaking.
 
I would see what you can save at delluniversity.com on an alienware. They are offering double discounts right now for the month of October.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top