Andrew_McP Posted March 16, 2006 Posted March 16, 2006 I just changed from a mobile Barton@2.2GHz to a x2 3800 (just so I can put Fraps on the second core while recording). It was a "cheap" upgrade because I'm using the same 2x512 of Corsair RAM, and my AGP X800Pro(flashed to XT) on the cheap and surprisingly capable Asrock Dual Sata board. To be honest I wasn't expecting a big improvement... MHz is still what matters most. And in many cases the improvement is, as expected, nothing to get excited about. However I was pleasantly surprised to find LOMAC seemed to benefit most from the new architecture. Obviously the CPU's memory controller works well with the wild & whacky Russian code ED are writing. Most of the benchmarks on the attached picture will be self-explanatory. The two LOMAC missions I used are... (1) A straight forward level flight, F2 view from behind, low over Seva with a small tank battle going on in the town. (2) An Su-25T mission where I fired several salvos of rockets (ie brought the frame rate to a crawl) while attacking a base in a valley with several defending radar sources. The only LOMAC settings I changed in my 1280x1024, x4fsaa, x8aniso defaults (maxxed except for medium water) were the viewing distances, as you'll see. Hopefully this will be some use to anyone else wondering if the money's worth spending. Obviously dual core is no good for LOMAC, and I only went dual core for movie making & editing (my "Vegas-lite" editor is multithreaded). If it wasn't for that I'd have chosen a single core 3700 San Diego (1Mb cache, overclock like hell from a nice starting point of 2.2GHz). Oh, you'll see I've only pushed my CPU from its default of 2GHz up to 2.4GHz. But it is rock solid stable and cool as a warm day in Moscow. I ought to be able to make 2.7GHz on this motherboard eventually, if I ever manage to wrap my head around the bios settings. :-) Andrew McP PS In the LOMAC tests the figures reported by Fraps are the Average, Minimum, and Maximum FPS over the first 60 seconds of the mission. The minimum and maximum are probably not too useful, but I find them useful to give a rough idea what to expect in real missions.
Guest EVIL-SCOTSMAN Posted March 16, 2006 Posted March 16, 2006 nice... although DC is basically useless for a number of things, it will shine when loads of programs are open or an app is multithreaded. so how ya likeing your new cpu ? after a few days testing, would you ever go back to single core ? btw, this thread gonna get pwnd and put in the tech section :/ ive never ever tried 64 xp, but i am in the process of blagging one for free from ms, just gonna see how that works out, as i aint upgradeing to vista, never ever will i be upgradeing to vista even tho it is 64bit.. loads of reason for me to not even think about vista...
Andrew_McP Posted March 16, 2006 Author Posted March 16, 2006 I only bought the x2 core for movie making. Otherwise it's a waste of money IMO, and I spent a lot of time researching this upgrade before I came to that conclusion. In the future multithreading may be much more useful, but you should always buy hardware to run today's software. Tomorrow is a big, unpredictable place and mainstream multithreading will take a long time to arrive in a fashion that's more than a token gesture. Potentially you can get 1.8x performance from two cores, but in reality you'll rarely get anywhere *close* to that. So far the PC just seems faster, "snappier" as you'd expect. But I don't go in for burning DVDs while playing Quake4, and there are no benchmarks to prove whether general desktop use is faster with two cores. Besides, who cares about snappier desktop performance? :-) If it wasn't for Fraps and my editor I'd definitely have bought a faster single core, especially for LOMAC. However, as my benchmarks show, there probably isn't a PC on the planet which can overcome the "I haven't fired rockets before, let's go load a lot of stuff up and drop the frame rate to 3FPS" effect. I really wish ED could give us a caching option to improve that. I'd buy more RAM tomorrow if another 1Gb could be used by LOMAC. Andrew McP PS For UK users, I got the processor last week from overclockers.co.uk for £190 inc VAT while it was on offer. It's an OEM chip, but the stock cooler isn't worth having anyway (unlike the stock cooler on the dual core Opterons, which is very good). With a Freezer 64 Pro it runs incredibly cool.
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