Widescreen Gaming Forum

If you were building a gaming pc, would you choose the 32 nm dual core Clarkdale i5 670 (3.4 Ghz, 3.73 Ghz with turbo mode, 73W TDP) or the 45 nm quad core Lynnfield i7 860 (2.8 Ghz, 3.46 Ghz with turbo mode , 95W TDP)?

I didn't realize that the Clarkdale CPU's were out!

I would choose a quad over a dual any day though. 3.4Ghz is easy to hit with a 860 too. So there really is nothing to lose going that route.

The Clarkdales are supposed to be available in January.

The Clarkdales are supposed to be available in January.

Ah well you would probably want to wait till then to even ask if thats when you are planning to buy.

i5 has no hyperthreading, dual channel instead of triple channel.. pick your poisons.

i5 has no hyperthreading, dual channel instead of triple channel.. pick your poisons.

-hyperthreading will seemingly randomly increase or decrease performance of games depending on how their multicore code is written out.
if I had hyperthreading I would probably deactivate it overall, unless the one game that I play a lot needs it a lot
-triple channel brings almost nothing to the performance table compared to dual channel (except the fact that in triple channel some motherboards get 2 additional slots for RAM)

tell me what type of games you play I'll tell you what you need if you wish.

Future proofing.. all future games will be heavily threaded :P

OSes like Windows 7 already take advantage of hyperthreading by scheduling threads from the same process to be run on hyperthreaded cores which is perfect since they don't need to swap out translation lookaside buffer.

The Clarkdales i5 dual core have hyperthreading while the i5 750 quad core doesn't. Thank you Intel for that non-confusing denomination :roll:

Future proofing.. all future games will be heavily threaded :P

OSes like Windows 7 already take advantage of hyperthreading by scheduling threads from the same process to be run on hyperthreaded cores which is perfect since they don't need to swap out translation lookaside buffer.

it is NOT that perfect either
depending on how's the game coded hyperthreading might have a beneficial or detrimental effect on a game.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/774-11/windows-7-performance-in-games.html

and that's just a small batch of games, who knows about those thousands of games out there might benefit or not from HT ...

as for "all" future game being heavily threaded, I don't know if it was a joke or not, but I don't think so. Threading a game has a cost, one has to ask what's the benefit: if it's for getting 200FPS instead of 100FPS on the average client computer it might not be that necessary ... ;)

I'll say it rather depends on what you want to play. Strategy titles benefit from those the most (if they are optimized) while action/FPS/RPG titles a lot less (in general! there's always exceptions...)