Conclusion

great..I was waiting for this one..

This why I went with the Q6600 I do more than one thing at a time.

I am so glad you finally did this test. With dual cores having an advantage of 25% clock speed its actually now apparent that for gamers dual cores are the better option - cheaper and faster.

Putting core i7 aside, those charts show that dual cores are the most attractive for gaming,plus they tend to have lower prices and higher clocks than quads, add better and easier overclockability on top of that, not to say lower power consumption (in general), and the choice seems no brainer, for all but the most spoiled gamer!
Nice article..

i dont believe that the dual cores are the way to go/best choice for gaming, as software from this point on will be callibrated for quads or above,

it clearly shows an improvement from dual to triple or even quads, and if most people are like myself when it comes to computing and gaming, pulling the best out of the system from the budget available, then the triple and quad core cpu's sure look better than the dual cores.

also down to price and overclocking ability, then the quads from intel can reach virtually the same speeds as the duals and with only a small price difference, making a better price to performance gain overall.

why are they only showing gaming benchmarks at 1024x768?

i'm a bit behind the curve and even i'm playing at 1680x1050?

cheers,
bill

p.s. stuff and nonsense: eupeople.net/forum

@goozaymunanos I think it's because the higher resolutions stress mainly the video card, while this test was to highlight the differences in the processors. Thus the video card was stressed as little as possible to allow the processor differences to shine through.

but that makes the game benchmarks basically synthetic as gamers wont be running at those low resolutions and low gfx levels on new hardware.

They should do gaming benchmarks at high deatails so i know how much of a difference a quad cpu will really make on the games.

Nice, I already ordered 955 Can't wait for it.

Am I the only one quite disappointed with the results?
I expected far better performance from dual / quad cores than a single core - basically like running multiple processors.

So I was expecting twice the performance with dual cores, and 4-times the performance with 4 cores.
I guess this might be expected where the processors were using dedicated caches?

Perhaps it also reveals that Windows isn't correctly taking advantage of the power of 2-4 cores - i.e. the kernel isn't too intelligently dividing multi-threaded / multi-apps capability to multiple cores.

I thought the question was mostly "Which applications really benefit from more than 2 cores?" anyway?

Would be interesting to see a benchmark with Supreme Commander since that's meant to be a well threaded game, and really needs CPU performance when a large number of units are in the game.

Another application which can really use multiple cores is software compilation (e.g. try compiling a kernel with the option: -j 4). But since the compiler itself is not (normally) threaded, but just run several times in parallel, clearly the performance increase is linear.

I suspect differences may be even more apparent on a Linux system than with a MSoft OS. Generally, Linux kernels multi-task more transparently amd should lend themselves to multi-threaded multi-processor tasking more efficently.

That's why the socket AM3-based Athlon II/Phenom II x2 seem so appealing, considering their cost. Not saying Core 2 is bad, either, just that I have some Socket AM2 stuff lying around and for a relatively cheap price these deliver killer blows for games, as well as provide a very good overclocking potential. Most of my clients have AMD's due to price restrictions but I have no complaints and at least I know that when I install these parts they're gonna run cool and fast.

And what happens when data intensive tasks run out of RAM or disk I/O. We need faster storage.
We still need faster fingers and eyes to go with the faster computers.