PC Upgrade Question

General Topics
1

Ok I come from a world where ther PowerPC Processor ruled for more than 10 years.

So a question for you guys that have used x86 chips for the past 15 years

I have A Pentium 4 Processor in My PC. It has Hyper-Threading.

My Motherboard will not support the new Core and Core 2 chips but it Will Support the Pentium D Processor.

So what Kind of performance improvement Will I get from upgrading from 2 virtual processors (hyperthreading P4) to 2 actual processors(PD)?

Keep in mind this computer has one sole purpose, Games, and that is all it does I everything else on the mac

2

Hope someone could help you… it’s behind my knowleage and imagination. Sorry, Mac :-[

3

Well I know that some games suffer an fps drop if they are not optimized to use dual core. You can set it to use one though. I plan on upgrading to Pentium D 9xx series myself. I’m using a Celeron D 352 3.2Ghz and an ATI X800 GTO with GDDR3 RAM and getting 30fps in Oblivion on average. BTW you can get the X800 GTO on newegg right now for $87 if you are looking for a decent card.

4

I don’t think that the Pentium D will show much improvement in current games performance solely because most games are not designed to be multi-threaded and take use of multiple processors.

I’m sure this will change in the near future, but I would rather get a Core 2 Duo Conroe.

5

xistenz, I also thought most games did not take advantage of Dual core that why I bought the pentium 4 about a year ago. (it does have HT though)

Negeltu, I have a nice card… Nvidia Geforce 6200 128Mb of memory

Tech, Dont worry I had no idea either what difference it made in the windows world (now I can tell you everything about Dual core in Mac OS X)

6

Oh… doesn’t that card only have 4 pixel pipelines? and 64bit memory interface or do you have the 128bit version?

I chose the X800 GTO because of the 12 pixel pipes, 256MB GDDR3 and 256bit memory interface. Just too good of a deal at $87 for me to pass up.

7

I have the 128 bit version. And yes it only has 4 pipelines. Did not know the X800 was that good, I will look into getting one :wink: