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BulletCatcher · 04-27-2006, 03:56 PM

While there may not be many games that take advantage of dual core at the moment, your multimedia tasks should see a healthy performance increase as most mainsteam multimedia applications (especially Adobe products) are dual core compatible out of the box.

I have a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and though I don't do a lot of serious multimedia apps I have seen a huge decrease in the time it takes to incode a home movie to DVD using Adobe Premier and load times and conversions are quicker in Photoshop. To test whether this speed increase was due to dual core or just the fact the CPU was faster than my old one I disabled the second core while running the apps and tested again. Without the second core everything took just about as long as my old CPU. Re-enabled the second core and was back to zipping along.

As for gaming, I have not really seen where having a dual core has made much of a difference other than some games have problems running and I have to disable the second core to correct the problems but this has only happened to maybe 3 games out of the 40 - 50 I've tried since upgrading so it doesn't appear to be a major issue. There are supposedly several upcoming games that should take full advantage of the second core. At the same time though I have heard that it is also very difficult to program dual core support for interactive applications such as games as opposed to static apps like Photoshop so how widespread the support becomes, at least in the next year or two, is anyone's guess.

Personally I'd say go ahead with the dual core. They are not much more expensive than a decent single core CPU and since you say you run multimedia apps you will see a benefit from having the second core. Gamingwise you probably won't notice much of a difference but it won't negativly affect you either other than possibly having a few games that you'll need to disable the second core to play.

Best bang for your buck, the X2 4200+. Solid performance and for the $100+ you save over the 4400+ all you give up is 200Mhz and 512k of level 2 cache memory. Yes the 512k can make a noticible difference in some cases but not enough to warrent the extra cost in my opinion.

04-27-2006, 03:56 PM	#2 (permalink)
BulletCatcher Crazy Location: America's Outback	While there may not be many games that take advantage of dual core at the moment, your multimedia tasks should see a healthy performance increase as most mainsteam multimedia applications (especially Adobe products) are dual core compatible out of the box. I have a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and though I don't do a lot of serious multimedia apps I have seen a huge decrease in the time it takes to incode a home movie to DVD using Adobe Premier and load times and conversions are quicker in Photoshop. To test whether this speed increase was due to dual core or just the fact the CPU was faster than my old one I disabled the second core while running the apps and tested again. Without the second core everything took just about as long as my old CPU. Re-enabled the second core and was back to zipping along. As for gaming, I have not really seen where having a dual core has made much of a difference other than some games have problems running and I have to disable the second core to correct the problems but this has only happened to maybe 3 games out of the 40 - 50 I've tried since upgrading so it doesn't appear to be a major issue. There are supposedly several upcoming games that should take full advantage of the second core. At the same time though I have heard that it is also very difficult to program dual core support for interactive applications such as games as opposed to static apps like Photoshop so how widespread the support becomes, at least in the next year or two, is anyone's guess. Personally I'd say go ahead with the dual core. They are not much more expensive than a decent single core CPU and since you say you run multimedia apps you will see a benefit from having the second core. Gamingwise you probably won't notice much of a difference but it won't negativly affect you either other than possibly having a few games that you'll need to disable the second core to play. Best bang for your buck, the X2 4200+. Solid performance and for the $100+ you save over the 4400+ all you give up is 200Mhz and 512k of level 2 cache memory. Yes the 512k can make a noticible difference in some cases but not enough to warrent the extra cost in my opinion.