Ok, so the question is, Which is a better option for a machine to get more performance out of a 4870x2.

Athlon BE 5400 @3.4 ghz (Air)
or
Phenom 9950 BE @3.0 ghz (Air)

Are 4 cores going to not throttle the pcb as much as 2 cores? Or does the amount of cores not matter and the only relevance is the highest speed of a couple cores?

I'm trying to decide whether to replace my burnt out cpu with an in-expensive dual-core now and wait for the high end 45nm Deneb's to be released, or whether it won't matter and I should just get a high end quad-core now.

-Dannar

I know you're gonna get more lengthy explanations in a bit, but here's a quick one... it depends on what games you play. Games that are fully optimized for greater than two cores would benefit from the Phenom... also, I believe clock-for-clock the Phenom is faster than the Athlons... sooo... with the exception of price, and assuming those are your only two options, I don't see any reason to go with with the Athlon. Phenom it is.

go for quad

Assuming you can hit those clock speeds...Quad.

What games out there now are optimized for more than 2 cores? I don't remember seeing any (even Crysis is only dual core optimized). I don't see any new games coming out in the next year supporting quads yet.

Check this out.
http://www.legionhardware.com/docu [...] id=770&p=5

For example in Devil May Cry at 1920x1200 their Phenom 9950/3GHz got 262 fps, as opposed to an X2 at 3.46 Ghz getting 169 fps. Of course, things will be different in other games and at other resolutions. In general, I'd pick the quad because there's always something going on in the background and the extra cores help.

Wasn't Supreme Commander?

LOL. Go to Task Manager and see how many processes you are running right now. Let me guess, between 28 and 57? Even if a game only uses one core or two, it may still work better on a quad because cores 3 and 4 can take care of the extra junk and the game gets to use its cores without sharing them with other things.

The quads here do marginally better than dual core. Maybe by 20% from 28FPS to 33 FPS (at the same clockspeeds), I got this from Tom's chart (not the best source but oh wells).

The number of tasks aren't divided among the cores that simply. And most of these tasks aren't running when you're playing games (CPU usage at 0%), so I don't see how that interferes with gaming (other than taking up more RAM).

Please correct me if I'm wrong about my above post.

Unless I'm missing something there, but I'm pretty sure that's how Windows handles resources.

OK, what about uploads/downloads, winamp, movie players, and whatever other things people might have on while playing? Are you closing off everything when you start a game? If you do, then sure, a quad won't add any value.

Okay, uploads and downloads I agree (but they take up what, 1-2% of your CPU usage with bittorrent). I've only used winamp while I'm playing games (but that only takes up 1% of my CPU usage, I'm running it right now) . Be real here, yes, you won't close off everything like IM's and your browser (in that case they're idle as well), but you actually watch movies when you play games? I can imagine some people can do that when they have a dual monitor setup.

Alright, I admit I forget those times when the annoying anti-virus auto scans pop out and you're like wow my comp is lagging (I've rarely noticed that problem ever since I swapped from single core to dual core) and maybe a quad core will reduce that lag even more.

I would consider how long you intend to keep that new CPU. For short-mid term (1-2 years), I would go with dual cores. But more and more apps will be coming out optimized for multiple cores, so if you intend to keep that CPU for longer, you will want a quad core. You will get a longer lifespan out of it.