Does Vista take advantage of Intel's QuadCore ?

JCF said:
He said it was "little more than a gimmick"
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I'm well aware what "he said", JCF, because I'm the "he" who said it :D

I'll stand by the comment too. Despite your concerns being for the most part quite accurate ones, this discussion needs to be placed in context.

It's quite obvious that the OT poster is planning a potential system upgrade for a machine which gets put to work at gaming and everyday productivity. That's obvious from this thread and from other threads the fellow has participated in recently.

The original post where I made the comment you've objected to carried clear acknowledgement that multi-core processors will enhance performance in relevent applications. To expand upon that, 'relevent' in practical terms means professional level workstation usage, basically. Heavy-duty, specialised applications areas and heavy-duty server usage. It does not, at this point in time, mean gaming or everyday productivity. It won't do so for a long time yet, and quite possibly never will.

It's also rather obvious that the OT poster is making inquiries about the things because he's heard of their existence and has gained the impression that they are a relevent item for him to consider. Quite a lot of people have. It's in the interests of the manufacturers that these things get distributed widely to reviewers who will rant about them, and promote them to 'enthusiasts'. Should the day ever come when software in general usage actually needs the things they'll be in more general circulation and will be much less expensive. Units sold now return cashflow. Units sold now, unless sold for the purposes they're suited to, are purchased for basically no real benefit.

Their promotion for anything else other than being put to work at the specialised tasks they are suited to is basically a marketting gimmick.

Personally I highly doubt that quad-core CPUs ever will become an everyday part of PC gaming. If they ever do then it'll be a long way off yet. Grabbing one of these to basically 'future-proof' a gaming PC sem a rather silly thing to do, IMO. I believe that any semblance of suggestion that they are an appropriate choice for such systems is basically a con.

I might well change my mind in a couple of years time, though. By then it might seem more probable to me that adding a quad-core CPU will future-proof a gaming PC
 
The QuadCore is a cool CPU, but the price is just more than I will spend on a cpu, I have always made a mental note not to spend more on a cpu than I would on a VideoCard which would give me more performance.

I mean if it was up between the QuadCore QX6700 or R600, the R600 would be cheaper and show a bigger benefit in games ? My 8800GTX is nice for Gaming, I just want to make sure Vista64 will run smooth butter, and I think instead of upgrading my CPU, it should be the memory and the newer Raptor 150gb harddrive, that baby is alot faster than my two year old 74gb drive.
 
Catweazle said:
The original post where I made the comment you've objected to carried clear acknowledgement that multi-core processors will enhance performance in relevent applications
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JCF isn't the first person in this thread to take a different read from your post.
 
I'd suspect it's quite probable JCF won't be the last to do so either. But the full elucidation of the post's meaning and intent is now available for people to read.

If the comment appears to be an attempt to troll for a reaction that's not the case, by the way. I could have used the term 'marketting ploy' I suppose, but that really means the same thing anyway. It's the use of a specific word being objected to here, and my only error was to not clarify in the earlier post that my use of "it" referred to the scenario within which Zorachus has come to the impression that a quad-core CPU will be a beneficial addition to a gaming/general usage PC, rather than referring to some inherent hature of the quad-core CPU itself.


Let me put it even more clearly:

There is currently no practical benefit to be gained from using a quad-core CPU in a PC which is used for gaming and/or the general everyday tasks which are commonly conducted on PCs. The things are suited only to specialised applications usage.

There is also no reasonable basis for expecting that this situation will change within the three years or so which would be commonly considered the 'useful lifespan' of a gaming PC.



Zorachus, you really need to add clear explanation of your computing habits to such questions. The E6600 would give more benefit for applications which are currently CPU limited. In other applications, which aren't CPU limited, the additional potential performance of the E6600 would give you negligible actual performance improvement over the FX-60 or even the X2 4400+

Even within 'gaming' there is variation. A supposedly better CPU will give bugger all benefit for FPS games, as a general rule. It might have more potential applicability to some other game genres, but only if you are currently being restricted by what you have. The same thing applies to everyday productivity tasks. There is variation in the practical benefit to be gained.

That's why I suggested that you try running with what you have (which is already very capable) and upgrade hardware only if you really need to. Your main concern seems to be the abaility to run games at high screen resolutions. For the most part, your installed RAM and display card will impact on that much, much, much more than your choice of CPU.
 
Catweazle said:
Zorachus, you really need to add clear explanation of your computing habits to such questions. The E6600 would give more benefit for applications which are currently CPU limited. In other applications, which aren't CPU limited, the additional potential performance of the E6600 would give you negligible actual performance improvement over the FX-60 or even the X2 4400+

Even within 'gaming' there is variation. A supposedly better CPU will give bugger all benefit for FPS games, as a general rule. It might have more potential applicability to some other game genres, but only if you are currently being restricted by what you have. The same thing applies to everyday productivity tasks. There is variation in the practical benefit to be gained.

That's why I suggested that you try running with what you have (which is already very capable) and upgrade hardware only if you really need to. Your main concern seems to be the abaility to run games at high screen resolutions. For the most part, your installed RAM and display card will impact on that much, much, much more than your choice of CPU.
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Thank's again for the advice :) I am leaning towards just upgrading the memory to a total of 4gb DDR400 = 4x1gb sticks, and a new harddrive RaptorX 150gb is faster than my first edition 75gb drive from three years ago. I think those two upgrade's with my current signature in Vista64 will be pretty dang fast, not as fast as Intel QuadCore in Vista64, but not too far behind I doubt ?

I mainly use my system for gaming 2560x1600 resolution, and from most benchmarks the GPU is the main factor, I have seen scores in games with a Athlon64 3500+ compared to an FX-62 and at that high resolution the difference was like 2% at most, but at lower res the difference was big time. I play WoW, BattleField2, Supreme Commander, will be QuakeWar's. Also surf alot of websites at night looking up news and technology, with mutiple pages open at a time, and downloads going, but that is about it :)
 
Serge84 said:
No its only optimized for AMD and dual socket FX's and opterons. ATM the only thing quad Vista supports will be AMD. Proof here...

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070108/sfm183.html?.v=1
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11571
http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories/86057_0_5_0_M
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070109/20070108006767.html?.v=1
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I am confused ? Even though I only have a AMD setup why doesnt Vista use more than a single core form Intel ? That doesnt make sense to me, that only AMD cpu's will have their DualCore used in Vista, but not for Intel ?
 
It was a nonsense post, Zorachus, which seems to have been made in an effort to be humorous. There's nothing in any of those articles which supports or even suggests such a contention.

Vista will work fine on both AMD and Intel processor-based systems.
 
Catweazle said:
It was a nonsense post, Zorachus, which seems to have been made in an effort to be humorous. There's nothing in any of those articles which supports or even suggests such a contention.

Vista will work fine on both AMD and Intel processor-based systems.
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I thought so, because this was the first I ever heard of it :) But the post didnt seem funny it looked like he/she tried to be serious, anyways :rolleyes:

So what do ya think of me just upgrading the memory to a total of 4gb DDR400, and a new faster hadrdrive the Raptor 150gb, so that way I can install Vista64 on a seperate drive, and it it fukks up I always have my Win2k system on the other drive ?
 
I've said from the outset that you should try installing and running Vista before lashing out on hardware purchases. If you add another hard drive to load it on then, well, extra hard drives are always useful anyway, no matter what you end up doing.

If you think there is need after trying it out, add more RAM. (Should you later decide to migrate to Core2Duo/whatever/DDR2 RAM you won't have any trouble flogging off that Socket 939 mobo/CP/RAM combo so youdn't need to worry about losing too much money.)

From the outset you've been trying to resolve a problem which you don't even know exisits yet ;)
 
Ok, this thread needs someone with real world experience. Me :D

I went from

Dual core [email protected] Ghz, 2 GB RAM and Windows XP to
Dual core [email protected] Ghz, 2 GB RAM and Vista 32bit to
Dual core [email protected] Ghz, 4 GB RAM and Vista 64bit to
Quad core [email protected] Ghz, 4 GB RAM and Vista 64bit.

Any of those was by no means slow, obviously. But the Quad just blows everything away.

Simple example: I play WoW and my machine is overkill for that, even though it's nice at 2560x1600 8xAA hehe...

Anyway, I play it in "windowed mode", so I can move the cursor out of the game to my other screen to do something there (e.g. change channel in my DVB-S software, answer instant messaging etc.). I also use the Windows key a lot to bring up the taskbar. It was there in an instant using my dual core E6400, so much faster than with a single core. It's there even faster with my Quad. And interestingly, WoW uses the 4th (!) core when playing, keeping the most used cores 1 and 2 totally free. Which means anything I run at the same time basically runs as if nothing else is running.

It's hard to actually point at anything else than synthetic benchmarks, but I can't screenshot the feeling that the quad is a huge improvement over the dual core. If you are like me and fire up all kinds of things while others are still running (WoW, DVB-S, Mail, Antivirus, IM, video encoding etc.) then a quad will have huge benefits. Especially if your system has the RAM to supply all of those applications with enough memory to avoid using the pagefile.

I ran the Supreme Commander Demo yesterday, 2560x1600, all setting set to max and as far as I could play, my Quad didn't break a sweat. I heard that some dual cores already do.
 
hmmm????


So you can have WoW, messaging, email, work, television and other stuff running all at the same time, and as soon as you think about doing something else other than the task you're currently focussed on it jumps up, smaps to attention, salutes and shouts out:

"Yass, SUH!, cap'n SUH!"

Now I ain't bellitlling it. I'm also quite sure that must be quite a satisfying experience to be confronted with. But please excuse me for being a bit skeptical anbout it actually being a performance improvement of much practical value. You can't do all those things all at once and divide your concentration amongst them all at the same time. Not unless you're some sort of freak.

Within that it;s a performance improvement to be able to run a more demanding game whilst other software is also running. I'm sure there's also a performance improvement involved with regard to the length of time it takes for a DVD copy to complete whilst you're attending to other stuff. But overall that description is basically a qualitative difference rather than a quantitative one.


Horses for courses. I personally wouldn't derive much satisfaction from having the different tasks snap to attention, salute and shout out their allegiance. There simply isn't enough of a delay even on an entry level dual-core system to be an annoyance. I regularly run up to a dozen apps concurently now.
 
Cat, we agree mostly, its jsut the term gimmick that bothers me because it suggests that the quadcore is not the real deal that it is.

The quad works circles around ANY other cpu by intel and amd with multithreaded applications.

Are 64bit instructions a gimmick just because you dont use them? I use them. Not for games though. The world doesnt revolve solely around games. Frankly buying pc hardware for games these days is rather risky and silly. There just arent that many games for the pc. CPU's are used for far more than games... and the quad will deliver performance above all the other cpus. Even if you're running multiple applications that arent multi threaded.

A gimmick suggests that the cores are thrown it as a marketing scam. That is not the case. They do deliver. And while it is true that not all games take advantage of them, and only perhaps 3 do... Any application written to take advantage of multiple cpus/cores will smoke the crap out of any single cpu version.

The rendering power of the cpu alone is blazing. It's not the cpu's fault that most games dont take advantage of it yet. Multiple cores are new to the intel line BUT multi process systems are not new. There are plenty of multi threaded very high end desktop applications that have been run on multiple cpu systems for 10+years now. The quad is an incredible solution.

I understand that someone playing doom may not need it, but there are a lot more people out there doing much more cpu intensive things on a daily basis, than jsut playing doom.

Do desktop gamers need quad xeons? no. Did they need single xeons? no. Were they a gimmick? no.

I've been using duals since i first went dual with a pentium pro 200 based system. Thats long time ago. I've been using multi thread apps that perform significantly better on multi processor systems.

Quads are the future... those of us in the highend have been using multiple cpu's for years. Its just trickling down now. We've all known that multiple cpu's perform very well.

I agree though. Dont run out and pay $900 for the qx6700... if you play games only. Its probably not for you... and you might as well wait and buy the hardware for the game you want... because games come out so infrequently now. Game releases can skip entire generations of hardware... even 2 generations. The quad Qx6700 could be $150 by the time a major game comes out that exploits all four cores. But i spent $1300 because I can use those cores right now to their fullest, and they are incredible.

You buy what you need. I just want to be clear that it is not a gimmick. A gimmick suggests that it doesnt perform. I'm glad you qualified it with the truth, which is that you need applications to take advantage of it. Everyones been making that known since the quad was released. I've known this since my dual pentium pro 200mhz days. I've been using multiple cpus since very effectively. Multi processor systems are used heavily today and have been for a long time. It is not a gimmick.. It's just not for everyone, just like 64bit instructions arent, and just like fiber channel raid systems that cost $5000 grand arent.

Again to be clear, you're not wrong, i just think the term gimmick doesnt apply. You've qualified your statement with truth but.. the gimmick line just doesnt apply.

I would say any gamer should stick to the fastest dual core right now. Not because quads arent the future... but because their cost is higher, and a gamer wont be taking advantage of it. That doesnt mean the quad's a gimmick, it means the gamers needs arent the same, and doesnt need to pay the higher prices for the extra performance. If a gamer were to buy a quad now... its not cost effective because it will only get cheaper, and faster cpus with more cores etc will come out over the years. If you need the power now... the quad is definatly your best option. But a gamer that just games, watchs dvds, surfs and uses Aim... Go dual core. I understand this is obvious to most of us here... but to those not in the know... and they're thinking of buying the quad because they automatically think its magical performance for all applications... thats their ignorance of the facts But It's still not a reason to call it a gimmick.

The QX6700 is a formula 1 car. Not everyone needs one... but we'd all like one... even if most people dont know how to drive one...
 
We differ, JCF, only in that I don't personally agree that everybody really does "make it known". Technically they might. but effectively they don't. consider, for example, this PR blurb straight from the Intel website:
New power, new speed. Quad-core from Intel.
Leaders of the pack seeking monster performance, look no further. With four execution cores, the Intel® Core™2 Quad processor blows through processor-intensive tasks in demanding multitasking environments and makes the most of highly threaded applications. Whether you're creating multimedia, annihilating your gaming enemies, or running compute-intensive applications at one time, new quad-core processing will change the way you do everything. Pioneer the new world of quad-core and unleash the power of multithreading.
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Where are the emotive terms in that (and thus where is it directed)? Fairly and squarely at benchmark-chasers and gamers is where! The journos who write up reviews follow suit with their use of emotive language. You know the reality. I know the reality. The reality is actually in there, in less emotive terms. But the hype is aimed elsewhere.

Call it a 'marketting ploy' if you're hung up on the word 'gimmick'. The word I used was never intended to describe the tool itself - just the way the tool is presented :D
 
I'm not much of a gamer, in fact all I play on PC at the moment IS WoW. But I am doing a lot of work on my machine and yes, I keep WoW running in the background while I'm swapping through my mails and have DVB-S running. I could afford to buy the Q6600 and it gives me more performance than my [email protected] Ghz. That's all I wanted. If it's a gimmick or not, I couldn't care less. I'm not saying people NEED a quad, I'm just saying they will see/feel the difference.
 
Jadawin said:
I'm not much of a gamer, in fact all I play on PC at the moment IS WoW. But I am doing a lot of work on my machine and yes, I keep WoW running in the background while I'm swapping through my mails and have DVB-S running. I could afford to buy the Q6600 and it gives me more performance than my [email protected] Ghz. That's all I wanted. If it's a gimmick or not, I couldn't care less. I'm not saying people NEED a quad, I'm just saying they will see/feel the difference.
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Thanks for the reply :)......very interesting that the QuadCore really does improve performance as I expected......Also the 4gb memory is a nice idea too......I think that is the best setup available
 
I mainly use my system for gaming 2560x1600 resolution, and from most benchmarks the GPU is the main factor, ... I play WoW, BattleField2, Supreme Commander, will be QuakeWar's. Also surf alot of websites at night looking up news and technology, with mutiple pages open at a time, and downloads going, but that is about it
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I'm not much of a gamer, in fact all I play on PC at the moment IS WoW. But I am doing a lot of work on my machine and yes, I keep WoW running in the background while I'm swapping through my mails and have DVB-S running.
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Quite different usage patterns there. The "work" reported there as the bit getting benefit from the CPU isn't getting done on your nachine.

I agree though. Dont run out and pay $900 for the qx6700... if you play games only. Its probably not for you... and you might as well wait and buy the hardware for the game you want... because games come out so infrequently now. Game releases can skip entire generations of hardware... even 2 generations. The quad Qx6700 could be $150 by the time a major game comes out that exploits all four cores.
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That piece of advice came from another quad-owner, remember. I've been watching the posts you've been making, and I'd not like to see you lash out spending money under the misconception that it's going to substantially improve your gaming.
 
Zorachus said:
What do ya think of this deal ? I want to upgrade to the FX-60 being the top of the food chain for my Socket939 and I guess still good for gaming, and then I could throw in my X2 4400 into my Wifey's system :) ? I just wish I could afford the major upgrade to the QuadCore Intel, but that would mean, new Motherboard, New CPU, and new Memory, your talking like well over a $1000+ for that, and what % increase do I get for that much money ?

But for a heck of alot cheaper I can get this, and is this the correct OS I want, the 64bit edition of Vista, is this the right model version ?;
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2880882&CatId=672


This system compared to that Intel system in gaming 2560x1600 is there a hige difference or just a little ?

Thank's
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Please take this in a friendly, honest fashion... That processor isn't going to do much for your performance... Its just too small of a jump for the price.. if you want top of the line performance today for a reasonable amount of money then you want a Core 2 Duo. Quad is just crazy expensive.

The fx-60 is a relic... thats why its cheap...
 
Catweazle said:
Quite different usage patterns there. The "work" reported there as the bit getting benefit from the CPU isn't getting done on your nachine.


That piece of advice came from another quad-owner, remember. I've been watching the posts you've been making, and I'd not like to see you lash out spending money under the misconception that it's going to substantially improve your gaming.
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Thank's again :)......I agree if I am mainly a eXtreme Gamer is seems mainly the factor is the GPu, especially at my resolution 2560x1600, and I already have a 8800GTX cant do much better today, until next March the R600......And all the high res benchmarks I see show the cpu not being too big a factor, I have seen an Athlon 3200 vs FX-62, which is a big difference in cpu power and at my 2560x1600 in gaming it showd maybe 2% difference, but at 1024 it showed like 40%
 
dekard said:
Please take this in a friendly, honest fashion... That processor isn't going to do much for your performance... Its just too small of a jump for the price.. if you want top of the line performance today for a reasonable amount of money then you want a Core 2 Duo. Quad is just crazy expensive.

The fx-60 is a relic... thats why its cheap...
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Yeah I have also read recent benchmarks and a FX-60 compared to my X2 4400 was like 10% difference in games, and at that low a percentage ya wouldnt even notice it in gaming ?

But even the E6600 showed like a 25-30% difference to my X2 4400, and the QuadCore was faster but not double the E6600 or even close, it was like 10% faster than the E6600, and the Qx6700 is way too much money for a cpu, the most I dont mind spending is on a new generation VideoCard, NOT a cpu
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=432&model2=468&chart=165
 
Serge84 said:
No its only optimized for AMD and dual socket FX's and opterons. ATM the only thing quad Vista supports will be AMD. Proof here...
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This is very true. Also, Intel chips can't really handle 64-bit Vista either. If you run 64-bit Vista, and it detects you have an Intel CPU, it uses the Internet to contact another Vista computer with an AMD CPU. Any 64-bit code is executed remotely on the AMD CPU.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
This is very true. Also, Intel chips can't really handle 64-bit Vista either. If you run 64-bit Vista, and it detects you have an Intel CPU, it uses the Internet to contact another Vista computer with an AMD CPU. Any 64-bit code is executed remotely on the AMD CPU.
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* chuckles *
 
it would be interesting to see which games are known to support multi processor systems.

I personally know Falcon 4.0 did many years ago. Quake and Doom support SMP through a command switch. Does HF2? Unreal3?

Crysis or however you spell it, supposedly does if i'm not mistaken.
 
Zorachus said:
Thank's for the reply ;) But how do I upgrade to another 2gb memory on my Socket939 ? I am already using 2gb DDR400, do they sell 2gb stick each of DDR400 ? Or if I fill up all four slots with 1gb memory each doesnt that change me from dual channel to single channel ?
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You can run dual channel on 4 sticks as long as they are matching pairs of sticks, in the correct slots.
 
JCF said:
it would be interesting to see which games are known to support multi processor systems.

I personally know Falcon 4.0 did many years ago. Quake and Doom support SMP through a command switch. Does HF2? Unreal3?

Crysis or however you spell it, supposedly does if i'm not mistaken.
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Alan Wake will supposedly have some optimizations for quad core systems. But it will for sure be multicore / proc aware.

AOE 3 is supposed to be multicore /multiproc aware as well.

IIRC, Valve has a new engine / SDK coming which will make full support of multicore / multiproc systems.
 
devman said:
You can run dual channel on 4 sticks as long as they are matching pairs of sticks, in the correct slots.
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So keep my current two sticks of DDR400 in their slots, and the two slots left open, fill that with 1gb sticks each, same brand same speed and that will give me total of 4gb, but still in Dual Channle mode ??
 
Zorachus said:
So keep my current two sticks of DDR400 in their slots, and the two slots left open, fill that with 1gb sticks each, same brand same speed and that will give me total of 4gb, but still in Dual Channle mode ??
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I currently run 4x 512MB modules in my motherboard in dual channel mode, so yes.

I plan on taking two out and putting in two 1GBs bringing me to 3GB total, (2x 512) + (2x1024) and running in dual channel.
 
Zorachus said:
So keep my current two sticks of DDR400 in their slots, and the two slots left open, fill that with 1gb sticks each, same brand same speed and that will give me total of 4gb, but still in Dual Channle mode ??
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yes, however please be aware that you will have addressing conflicts between RAM and memory mapped devices in 32-bit windows, which will "make some of your RAM disappear", so that you will probably only be able to "use" ~3.5 GiB, depending on your hardware.
 
drizzt81 said:
yes, however please be aware that you will have addressing conflicts between RAM and memory mapped devices in 32-bit windows, which will "make some of your RAM disappear", so that you will probably only be able to "use" ~3.5 GiB, depending on your hardware.
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But this upgrade will be for Vista64......so doesnt that take advantage of the 4gb ?......Thank's
 
Zorachus said:
So keep my current two sticks of DDR400 in their slots, and the two slots left open, fill that with 1gb sticks each, same brand same speed and that will give me total of 4gb, but still in Dual Channle mode ??
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Yes it will still be in dual channel, but you might have to back off the MHz on the RAM slightly.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
Yes it will still be in dual channel, but you might have to back off the MHz on the RAM slightly.
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What if I just keep the setting in bios to auto detect will that be enough to handle the 4gb ?......also my Brother said one time he tried to fill up all four memory slots, and using XP he had some unusual lock up's ?
 
Zorachus said:
What if I just keep the setting in bios to auto detect will that be enough to handle the 4gb ?
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Should do.

Zorachus said:
......also my Brother said one time he tried to fill up all four memory slots, and using XP he had some unusual lock up's ?
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Dunno. Seems like you're better off asking your brother about what happened. Do you really mean to ask if Windows XP will randomly lock up when run on a machine with four gigs installed? The answer to that is no, unless there's driver bugs. Three (er, or four?) of the machines I use every day have 4 gigs of memory and don't randomly lock up.
 
That's just a reposting of the bundle you mentioned in the original post. It seems to me that you are simply continuing to post in the hope that somebody will finally say "Yes, that's great for you. Go get it!"

Anyone saying that would be wrong. It was said early in the thread that your current system is fine for your purposes. You don't need to upgrade your system to run games under Vista. You only need to wait until display drivers are a bit more mature to get ~ the same game performance in Vista as you've been enjoying in XP.

From the usage patterns you've described you also don't need Vista Ultimate. Vista Home Premium is all your usage requires, and either an OEM copy or (better still) a retail upgrade copy would suit your purposes.

There is no need to get an FX-60 and an FX-60 would not add enough to your game performance to justify its cost. Grab a copy of Vista if you want to run that OS, and upgrade your system when you need to do so. You've obviously got budgetary restraints, or you wouldn't be pursuing this. You have an entry-level superceded motherboard, and if you can't afford a mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade then wait until you can afford that before upgrading your system. The CPU upgrade will do stuff-all for you.
 
I also have a second syastem I spend money on to upgrade as well :)......It is my Wifey's computer, but my Brother's come over and game on that along side me......Her spec's are;

Athlon64 3500
ATI X1800XT-512mb
1gb DDR400
35gb Raptor harddrive
Audigy2
Samsung 24" LCD

So anytime I upgrade I always throw in my old parts into that computer to keep it pretty good as well to still game on......So I wouldnt mind making my current system the top of the line AMD for today, then I could throw in the DualCore X2 4400 into my Wifey's system.

Thing is if I go the Intel route the only way I would be happy is with the new 680i Motherboard, 4gb DDR2, and would love the QuadCore, but that upgrade alone is like close to $1800.00 :eek:......So for now I will be happy with a total of 4gb DDR400, just need two more sticks of Corsair memory......A new Raptor drive for two reason's; one it is the newer and faster model than my three year oldie, and two it is twice as large :)......And MAYBE the FX-60 just to OC a little better, and it is almost 20% faster clock stock

I guess I could compare my purchase of the FX-60 and new DDR400 memory which would be approx $550.00......To; eVga 680i motherboard, E6600, and 2gb DDR2, which may be approx $700.00 or so and for $150 difference would get alot more satisfaction ??
 
If you see a significant need to buy the stuff, buy it. I would call a significant need the point where you couldn't play new games anymore, or everyday computing tasks make the poor box slow to a crawl, but that's just me. Anyway, there's no way any of that should be happening on your rig.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
If you see a significant need to buy the stuff, buy it. I would call a significant need the point where you couldn't play new games anymore, or everyday computing tasks make the poor box slow to a crawl, but that's just me. Anyway, there's no way any of that should be happening on your rig.
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Your right, and my main thought on upgrades and given the fact I have Upgrade-itus, I usually only upgrade if that new hardware will be minimum 33% faster or 1/3rd faster than the current gear, that is when I think about it, if it is 50% faster that is a green light no questions asked.

So VideoCard wise there is no where to go, except possibly the R600, but I doubt it will be 30% faster than the 8800GTX, yeah it will be a Beast and faster, but I would think 25% would be asking alot ?

CPU's, I have seen that at my resolution of 2560x1600 no cpu makes a difference for my 8800GTX, meaning benchies I have seen of higher end CPU's from the AMD FX60 to Intel EX6800 they are exactly the same.

Memory; I am not too sure , well 2gb is the Gamer's standard today, but I am wondering if 4gb under Vista64 makes a difference ? Maybe not so much in games but what about everyday OS work, and newer games like SupCom are very CPU, and memory dependant ?

HardDrives; yeah a larger one is always good, and the current Raptor's are pretty fast, my 75gb Raptor is the old original model from three years ago.
 
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