Will I notice a difference in gaming going to a 4 or 6 core cpu?

armysgt1

armysgt1

Member
I have a dual core 550 B.E. OC'ed to 3.6ghz. I'm looking to spend around $200 give or take. Should I get the quad 975 B.E. 3.6ghz or the 6 core 1090t 3.2ghz? I could even save a little more and go for the 6 core 1100t 3.3ghz. I just figure my CPU is bottle necking my pc because I just bought a 6950. On the other hand, if I'm going to spend around $200, should I just save a little more and get another 6950? What do you guys think?
 
armysgt1 said:
I have a dual core 550 B.E. OC'ed to 3.6ghz. I'm looking to spend around $200 give or take. Should I get the quad 975 B.E. 3.6ghz or the 6 core 1090t 3.2ghz? I could even save a little more and go for the 6 core 1100t 3.3ghz. I just figure my CPU is bottle necking my pc because I just bought a 6950. On the other hand, if I'm going to spend around $200, should I just save a little more and get another 6950? What do you guys think?
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You are better off getting a 955 if you plan on using the system for gaming and general, every day use. If that is all you will use your system for, you won't see the benefit of 2 extra cores.

I am also going to point out, at the time of posting this a 965 is the same price as a 955:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727

Either way, you can change the multiplier so you are at 975 speeds, and you shouldn't need to touch the voltages at all. As you will be able to see yourself though, you will also be saving money that way
 
OK, well I just unlocked the third core on my 550. My 4th core must be bad even though it was unlocked and stable for over a year on my old gigabyte motherboard. I have it running at 3.6ghz so would it even be smart to get a quad core for gaming? That is mainly what I use my pc for besides internet and movies. I rarely encode video and things of that nature. I was also thinking the 975 because wouldn't it be able to overclock the highest?
 
If the game you're looking at doesn't use more than one or two cores, getting a quadcore or hexacore CPU won't increase your performance (unless you're current CPU isn't as fast as the one you look at buying)

In your case I'd say it's not worth buying now. Bulldozer is just around the corner.
 
Cpu

Only about 1% of the software still created today utilizes more then one core of the proccessor. So most likely your not going to see much of an advantage seeing that each core L2 cache size is still 512KB and both have a shared 6mb L3. You could see a small diff between the Hyperstransport speeds between the core 6 and core 4 though.
 
OK thanks guys but let's say hypothetically, I'm unzipping a large file (5gb or more), watching a movie, downloading a file, and playing a game at the same time. Will having more cores be better for multi-tasking or does ram have more to do with that?
 
cratecomps said:
Only about 1% of the software still created today utilizes more then one core of the proccessor. You could see a small diff between the Hyperstransport speeds between the core 6 and core 4 though.
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Thats alittle bit of over stating there. There is alot of programs that use 2 cores and quite a few that use 4.

Plus the Hypertransport speed between the Phenom II X2/X3/X4 and X6 is the same.
 
The more is always better, My single core laptop always lag and the dual core don't have the problem at all, it is alway good to have it if you can affoard it even if you don't use it most of the time.
cheers
 
I agree with StrangleHold. When I first upgraded from my Athlon 4000+ Single-Core Processor to an Athlon Dual-Core 4600+ I noticed a huge increase in processing power (and this was back in June 2008).

More and more software since 2008 is utilizing more than one core. I notice a lot of single-core computers have bottlenecks when dual-cores do not.
 
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