Does dual-core really make that much a difference?

Got back to my college dorm after 3 weeks of holidays...as to which I spent nearly all that time on my MacBook Pro.

Anyways, I have to say, my old single-core PC here just feels god forsaken slow in everything now when it comes to multitasking, with the PC choking up whenever I have it load something.

Going to clean the old thing up, beginning with the 50+ icons on the desktop, as to which my MacBook only has the recycle bin onscreen when bootcamped into WinXP.
(speaking of which, how do you remove the recycle bin icon anyhow?)


[EDIT] While on the topic, anyone got a recommendation for a CPU upgrade? Its got a 939Dual mobo from ASRock ninstalled, as to which it'll only take AMD CPUs, and I'm unsure what the current going rates on AMD64 X2s are.
(it currently has an AMD64 3700+ installed, which unfortunately I picked up before the whole Intel Core2Duo thing picked up big time)

The computer i use in work in dual core. You can't tell though, as it's had all sorts installed and uninstalled on it. Runs a hell of alot slower than my home pc. Single core 64 athlon 3200+

I have a dual core mac, the two cores means that one whole application can run on one core while another one runs completely separately on another, so there is no slowdown, ie the total available CPU power is split in half and kept that way. The downside of that is that no single-thread application can use all of the CPU power.

939 processors are quite hard to come by now and seam to be a bit over priced if people have them. Im in the same boat. ive got a athlon 64 3200 single core on socket 939 and i could do with an upgrade. id get a core duo system but ive got a x1950pro agp graphics card and the 775 motherboards with agp are rubbish

I upgraded from a 939 athlon64 3200 to an X2 4600 about this time last year, just as they stopped mainstream (all?) production of the 939 range to push the AM2 socket. It did have a slight increase in boot times, and definitely general responsiveness of apps in Windows "felt" better, and some games I got a bit more out of (Oblivion for sure, I think Source-based games like HL2 also got a bit of a boost).

I had a feeling by the time I'd upgrade to a PCI-E card that my mobo would have been rendered useless already. ;/

Since I moved from an AMD64 3000+ to an Intel Core Duo E6700, I can notice the difference. Everything is much faster, especially compile times and how well displacement painting works in Silo. Having 3gb of RAM helps too- not going to be running out of memory very often now (it'll still happen though- either I'll do it, or someone else will cause it).

For games and general use you're unlikely to notice much difference.

Not necesarily -- even though your single application and/or game won't benefit directly from the second core, all your other programs do.

Before I had a dual core PC it would grind to a halt each time the virus scanner did an automated full disk scan in the background -- now I don't even notice anymore, since the virus scanner happily does its thing on the other core, and no longer interferes with the game I'm playing at the time.

another nice thing about the dual cores is that bootup time is almost halved.

This is what I'm really starting to notice now after playing both a game and using Firefox at the same time (got my dual-screen setup up and runnin again <.<), with both programs fighting for the CPU whenever they actually need it.
(guess I could throw WinAMP into the mix as well since it's playing a tune in the background)

i notice it, expecially when using windows and its doing all the crap after login. With my single centrino it becomes unuseable for about 5-8 minutes. On my Dual centrino while slowish it is still quite useable.

In a Blitz3d game environment - yes it does - I say this having experienced the benefit in the large commercial project I have been working on in the last 12 months and it runs much better on a dual core pc with 2 x 2.66 mhz cpus than a single 3.20 Ghz P4 cpu.

The improvement is about 30-35% improvement in fps and the ability to have more of everything because of that - in one section of the game I have approximately 28 none player characters of about 2,500 polygons each wearng combinations of different clothing textures, along with lots of particles, a mirrored floor on a vast landscape and all animating away nicely.

IPete2.

I dont think its amazingly important, basically its all down to programming if the programs use it then you will notice but basically Windows XP is inherantly single core unless you specifically buy the 64 bit edition (this comes from the versions I have and information I have on XP).

I've never used virus scanners etc. but i imagine they would cause quite a slowdown.
Theres no inherent difference between 32/64 xp for most people as far as multi core goes, its mainly down to the software.
Multi core will run much smoother but apps wont run much faster unless theyre specially written for it.

Not strictly true, the way I understand it. In the case of games, which will generally take up as much processor time as permitted by the OS, all the other background tasks will be moved to the other core(s) not being utilised by the game itself. As such, a game will run a lot smoother and even quicker because it won't be getting hindered by other background tasks as it would on a a similar spec'd single core system. Therefore, even single core/threaded apps/games will benefit.

Just curious, how important is the L2 cache on a CPU?

My current CPU has 1mb, but the dual-core 3800+ I'm looking at has 2x 512kb, which I'm assuming means 1 per core?

I'm just trying to find a cheap temporary upgrade, getting a little annoyed with the amount of CPU fighting is going on between my apps ever since I started running more apps at once thanks to my dual-screen setup.


Going to look around for something higher-spec in the meantime, I recall my mobo case saying it can go up to the 4400+ range on AMD64 CPUs.

[EDIT] Wait a second, my mobo's specs states it can support a CPU upgrade from 939 to AM2....need to check that one out.

[EDIT2] Hmm, seems I can get the upgrade board for CDN$32..., I'm just curious how it works though, I'd have assumed the weight of a CPU/heatsink/RAM would be a bit much for a hanging board?

Time to do more research, if that thing works all well and dandy, then this motherboard still has quite a bit of life in it.

all cache is important. Think of it as the ultrafast version of your RAM sticks.
512kb per core is less, unless your CPU is being weird about sharing its 1MB cache between cores.
Anyway, its been established long ago that C2D CPU's are better than AMD's equivalent offerings. Do yourself a favour and buy the better one.

That would involve me having to buy a whole new motherboard though, and then worrying about all the possible compatiblity conflicts it may or may not have with my existing hardware. ;/

Just trying to get a couple more years out of my current rig with a little upgrade in the CPU department.
(and possibly the graphics area as well when 8800GTs come down in price a little more)

Yes. Which is probably the main reason that the Intel Core 2 DUo's are beating AMD X2's in the benchmarks these days, since the Core 2's have either 2MB or 4MB cache... (Shared amongh both CPU's, which is good as well -- If your X2 only runs stuff on the 1st core, it can use 512KB cache, while the other 512KB is stitting unused. On the Intel CPU's the first core can use the entire 2 or 4MB if the other core isn't using it)

Ipete2 example shows nothing of dual core benefits.

"yes it does - I say this having experienced the benefit in the large commercial project I have been working on in the last 12 months and it runs much better on a dual core pc with 2 x 2.66 mhz cpus than a single 3.20 Ghz P4 cpu."

The simple fact is that the core duo is a much faster cpu compared to a p4 or amdx2; unless you write threaded apps you'll see no benefit from dual cores other than a few % gained from general windows housekeeping being done on other cores. I suspect a lot of the benefits people see are placebo effect. ie they;ve spent a lot of money upgrading so there better be benefits.

I often wonder too because my A64 3000+ plays most games like crysis fairly well with decent settings. Obviously not as good as the latest machines, but I sometimes think that CPU isn't as important as good components, especially the mobo and bus efficiency.

I'm talking about games mostly, the areas where dual core really shines is in apps that are designed around them, and there really arent many of these yet.

Yeah, for my purpose, it would be a mix of 'general housekeeping' with gaming, as I play windowed whenever possible, so I can still surf the web, run photoshop, music, etc, all simultaneously.

As it stands on this PC, doing all that is just dog slow compared to the core2duo on my MacBook Pro, although they both perform roughly on the same terms with regards to video games.
(excluding ones that make heavy use of PS3.0, where the 8600m in my laptop runs circles around my 6800GT. That MacBook can achieve 2x the frame-rate on any Unreal engine game with everything cranked at a higher resolution in comparison....didn't expect it to perform so well in Gears of War)