• A Great friend to the HardForum with a great kid that he is trying to get a scholorship to continue his schooling. Please give hime a vote! Only 24 hours left! Thanks.
    If you have an VOTE FOR KEENAN!

my brain is about to explode

S

slightlyhuman

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 20, 2003
Messages
1,186
So I'm looking into a quad core for my laptop. It currently has a 2.8ghz C2D(6mb cache). I was talking to a guy I play bf3 with about it and he said I should get an x9100(3.06ghz 6mb) c2d and would get better performance. Mainly wanting to upgrade my bf3 experience on my laptop.

I don't understand how a c2d can out perform a c2q with 12mb of cache.

Then he wrote this:

99% of the time it does. I have gone over this many times. The primary reasons, or gist of the situation, is when a thread is not run as afffinity set, which is most of them. This mean the thread has to be doble loaded to each core on the CPU and data off loaded as well. This causes a huge cycle per cycle perfornamce hit between the CQD and C2D. Then there is where they ae affinity set at stock on non quad thread opps the C2D is clocked way higher and overclocks higher as well...............

Edit; the iCore handles threads and cache differently. This is why with the CQD intel never pushed it on the masses but has no issue in doing so with the iCores......................



Can someone educate me and tell me if I'm wasting my time?
 
A quad is what you want, no doubt. Not sure what that guy is on about, but regardless BF3 will run more than two threads and a quad is what you want. I've played BC2 and BF3 on dual cores and the gameplay feels laggy.
 
are you sure you can upgrade your cpu in your laptop? the extra heat from a c2q would make that thing run real hot.
 
tricky0502 said:
are you sure you can upgrade your cpu in your laptop? the extra heat from a c2q would make that thing run real hot.
Click to expand...

yes, my chipset is compatible. the cooling however will be a project. i'm making a small air-duct to sit right by my intake. i have a window directly beside where my lappy will be.

any special thermal paste/? heard something about ic7 or something. also, throttle stopping is something i've read about, any one have any experience in this that can point me in the right direction? :cool:
 
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. A quad will be absolutely superior in Bf3 and his bizarre theory is wrong anyway.
 
Not sure how people got the idea that it's normal for cpus to be soldered to the mobo on laptops. I probably take apart a couple dozen laptops a week and it's pretty uncommon to see a cpu soldered to the mobo on any machine that cost more than ~$250 new or isn't a mac.

What are the rest of the specs on your laptop OP? I would think it's more likely your gpu is holding back your bf3 exp.
 
Your friend prob believes like alot of people that 99 percent of games are optimized for dual cores so quads don't mean poo. He might not even know what BF3 is as a game (optimized for more than 2 CPU cores), I've seen people on these very same forums who don't know which games are multicore enabled, and downplay an X3 or X4 but apparently people are slowly getting the idea.
 
A few years ago that guy might have been right. Dual cores came out and caught on much faster than Quads and games actually seemed to take great advantage of two cores compared to one and even against quads as odd as it sounds it made sense in a way.

Quads gave the flexibility of being able to do more things in the background while gaming and not losing performance, at the expense of Quads usually being much lower in clock speed in comparison. I'm guessing clock speed had a huge part of it when comparing old games not utilizing more than two cores. I'm guessing if you could OC those quads to dual core speeds you'd hardly see much of a difference. Nowadays games, new ones especially, are finally starting to take advantage of more than 2 cores. Skyrim and BF3 in-particular from what I've read can utilize all 4 like a boss. In this day and age I'd say the argument for dual core gaming superiority is pretty much over. By the time you revisit a game that wasn't designed around >2 cores they'll be so powerful per-core that it wont matter.
 
On my 2670wm Sandy Bridge Quad Core BF3 uses all 4 cores plus all 4 HT units. So I am using 8 threads. I always heard BF3 could only address 6 threads but even on my 3930K desktop all 12 threads are fired up with huge load on 64player maps.

with bf3 the more threads the better. This is a very CPU heavy game probably due to the massive amount of calculations being offloaded to the processor, i.e. physics, player positions, networking, and other factors that I am not even aware of. I'll post some graphs later if I get time.

edit.... for all you quad and 6 core users out there, google "How to disable core parking in win7" and you will be dumbfounded at the performance increase you see across the board in windows. Okay fine at the cost of a few more watts of power. Who's looking anyway? haha
 
BF3 runs slow if you only have a dual core: http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/14650-prestandaanalys-battlefield-3/5#pagehead

I know it's in another language, but just look at the bottom of the graph. Note the low numbers next to the Phenom II 560, a dual core, but the 980, a quad, runs decent. As others have said, the more cores and threads you have for BF3 the better. Then see how the 1100T, an x6, has a nice jump again from the 980.

If you can upgrade, and it doesn't cost a fortune, go ahead.
Keep in mind it may just be better to get a new laptop and sell the old one.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top