cut price skt 939's

ive been out of the cpu/dual core loop for a while and i currently run a 3700 san diego, after seeing there are price cuts coming can you fellas really see a 4800 X2 939 selling at £150?
i was tempted by OCUK's price on the 4000 sandy at £166, but if i can have a dual core at same sorta money i'll wait on.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_This_Week_Only_25.html

and how much of a performance hike do you think a 4800 X2 would have over a 3700 san diego at stock settings? sorta percentages would be good.

i purely game on my current system mostly BF2, FIA GTR

thanks
LP

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My opinion is that for pure gaming single core procs work better at this time as no games are coded for dual core.

There is no telling when devs will start coding for dual core performance in games. I think a few games exist that get a benefit from dual core but not many.

Also, if you really want more performacne from a dual core setup getting a chip with 1mb cache per core would be optimal. The problem is I do not beleive there will be any price cuts for the dual 1mb cache chips. I think its only the dual 512k cache chips that will get the cut along with the single core chips.

Would there be a increase in performance of a game if the physics calculations were sent to a second core/processor while the first one carried on with the rest of the calcs?

Is this even feasable?

so coding for dual core, would that be a total rewrite on an existing game?
i dont understand how coding works with cpu's.if they started coding for DC would the game still work on a single core system?

thanks for the swift reply btw..

Tacoman667 said:

Would there be a increase in performance of a game if the physics calculations were sent to a second core/processor while the first one carried on with the rest of the calcs?

Is this even feasable?

Click to expand...

Hmmmm, thats a good question. Chances are it would be a programming nightmare and devs wouldnt even try to do it even if it was possible. It could also hinder performance, but again this is just speculation

lostplanet said:

so coding for dual core, would that be a total rewrite on an existing game?
i dont understand how coding works with cpu's.if they started coding for DC would the game still work on a single core system?

Click to expand...

As far as I know a game would have to be coded with the dual core support. Not sure if they could come out with a patch for games or not. Pretty sure its not so simple. If it was so simple to just make a patch to add dual core processing then they would have started it already.

Yes any game with dual core support built in would run perfectly fine on asingle core.

Dual cores biggest advantage is multitasking. I you like running multiple apps at the same time and tend to alt tab between them while they run in background then dual core is excellent. If you just play BF2 and have nothing else running while you are playing then you are not using the dual core abilities very much.

One thing I want to make clear is while a single core proc will do better in a gaming envirment over a dual core in most cases, we are not talking HUGE HUGE performance gaps. At most I would say it would boil down to some FPS loss maybe. Chances are you wouldnt eve notice the difference between a 2.2ghz dual core and a 2.2 ghz single core.

A lot of games DO have dual core support, and in some (such as Quake 4) it can give a rather large performance boost.

I moved from a 3000+ to an X2 3800+. I'm happy that I did, too. Its nice to be able to run an encoder in the background, or defragment, or whatever, and still be able to play a game. If you sell your current processor, you might nearly pay for a dual-core, depending on who you sell it to.