Dual Optetron vs Athlon 64 3400 for gaming purposes

gop

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Which computer would be supperior? Two of these: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-397&depa=1

vs a Athlon 64 3400+ (Clawhammer, 1MB L2 Cache)?

I've looked around and there isn't many benchmarks pertaining to dual processor vs single processor. Especially for gaming purposes. And finally, in a standard desktop environment, which would win and by how much? Thanks.

The graphics card will be: 6800GT with two sticks of: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-145-450&depa=1
 
welllllllllllllllll

dual opterons will have an advantage in gaming if you intend to run high end games at once :D . Those dual opterons wont be able to run 400mhz ram. 246 opterons will. Also as your should already know youll need registered ram and possibly ECC.

and if you decide to go opterons i reccomend the motherboard i got ;)

if you intend to be running a game and very little else the 3500 will be good. :)
 
not many games i know ofa re able to utilise a dual processor setup, i think the A64 3400+ would make the superior gaming computer
 
Yes it would. SMP is almost never used in games, it's a waste. 3400+ all the way. My friend runs a dual opteron 246 with 3 GB of ram and his gaming experience isn't even close to mine. Rendering however, is a different story.
 
3400+ will be the most cost-effective way to go and performance will probably be fairly stellar. The dual Opteron would make a nice workstation, but it won't "do" much for a gaming rig.
 
thanks. it'd be cool if games utilised the processing power of both processors wouldn't it?
 
Well, with the introduction of nForce3 Pro 250 (Iwill DK8N uses that), there is now a dual Opteron platform that can be compared on a level playing field as single CPU platforms (single Opteron, AthlonFX and Athlon64). Chances are, with NUMA and 2 CPUs, you'd get a slightly better performance in gaming situations. ;)
 
spikegifted said:
Well, with the introduction of nForce3 Pro 250 (Iwill DK8N uses that), there is now a dual Opteron platform that can be compared on a level playing field as single CPU platforms (single Opteron, AthlonFX and Athlon64). Chances are, with NUMA and 2 CPUs, you'd get a slightly better performance in gaming situations. ;)
But it'll still cost a lot more to get Opterons of the same performance level as the faster desktop chips, you're still going to pay more for RAM, the motherboard, etc. The performance difference won't be much better in games...Not any better than a single-CPU machine with "regular" memory access in 98% of the cases out there.
 
joecuddles said:
My friend runs a dual opteron 246 with 3 GB of ram and his gaming experience isn't even close to mine. Rendering however, is a different story.

do you by chance have any numbers? rendering maya or max benchmarks or whatever. i was looking for a direct comparison between single CPU/1GB of RAM and really high-end workstations on the other (which IMHO a dual optern 246 /w 3GB of RAM indeed is), but could find none. would be grand,
j
 
For most rendering apps, render times from single to dual cpu run about 50-95 percent faster as long as the software can take advantage of an SMP setup..
 
defakto said:
For most rendering apps, render times from single to dual cpu run about 50-95 percent faster as long as the software can take advantage of an SMP setup..

woha - that seems a bit much! i thought 160-170% is the most you can make of a dual CPU setup whatever app we are talking about. again - i don't know for sure though. the only comparison i have for a dual board is a friends ASUS A7M266-D /w dual Athlon XP 2400s and a gig of ram. in comparison to my system (see sig) we render frames in maya 5.0 almost identically when using the benchmark used at highend3d.com.

did you guys do some renders changing RAM from one to 3 gigs to see how much that really helps? depends on the type of render a lot of course...
 
From my experience, messing around with pov-ray, which is standard single processor supported only, using a hack around someone created that would allow a distributed render, while rendering on my dual opteron box, times went from 45 minutes to about 25 minutes. And that's not even for something actually optimized for SMP.
 
As a general rule of thumb, assuming you're using an app that's properly multithreaded, you can expect around 170% of the performance vs. a single CPU. A lot of this depends on the platform though too. Like with Opterons and high end Opteron boards for example, each CPU is directly linked to the system ram. Some lower priced boards have one CPU acting as the memory controller and the other CPU goes through it.
 
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