Dual-Core Processors give you twice the processing power! Or so I'm told...But are there any games out there that take advantage of this incredibly powerful processor? I know the Xbox 360's games will all be using this processor, but are there any computer games currently out there? I don't want to go out and buy one of these things if there's nothing new to play on them......
Dual-Core processing doesn't mean that you get twice the processing power or twice the speed at all. It's basically a cheap and efficient way of having a dual processing system by putting two separate CPU cores (each with their own cache) on one chip, instead of having two completely separate CPUs.
If you had a system with 3.2GHZ dual core CPU, it's not going to run at 6.4GHZ. It will still run at 3.2GHZ, but your system will run more efficiently, especially when multitasking. For example, suppose you were running a very CPU intesnive program that was draining your resources. In a single processor system, the other tasks that you were doing would also be affected (as I'm sure you've experienced before) and slow down significantly. But in a dual processing system, you'd have that second processor to handle other tasks, and so they wouldn't be affected by the other CPU operation, and would run a lot more smoothly.
So unless you plan on doing a lot of multi tasking with your PC while playing resource intensive games, I don't think you'd really benefit much from paying for a dual processor or dual core system. It won't make your games run faster, because only one of the CPU cores would be running them anyway. If anything, it would be more worthwhile to upgrade your video card, as that has a much bigger effect on game performance than a dual system would.
Yep. Until games are programmed to run on multiple cores/processors, like the Xbox 360 games ( I think ), there will be no difference. Unless you're running a virus scan at the same time, then, it will be faster, if I recall correctly, as the game will run on one core and the scan on the otehr.
I multitask all the time... I sure could benifit from this... had I been able to afford it.
Yeah, the real question is whether or not it's worth the extra cash to you. An Athlon 64 3500+ Venice would cost about $200 retail, whereas the dual-core equivalent, the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, costs $400.
Prices from [url]www.newegg.com[/url]
You could just do what I do and turn crap off that you're not using; keep in mind that you can always get a single-core now and upgrade to a dual-core later. I predict that eventually the price difference between the two varieties will drop to be nearly insignificant given the benefits of the latter, but at this point, it would only be worth it if you run a bunch of very intensive applications at the same time. The Athlon 64 3500+ should be enough to run any game you throw at it just fine, assuming you have complementary hardware.
Oh and the Xbox 360 has a triple-core processor.