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Pentium D 3.0 vs. Athlon 64x2 3800+ vs. Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz

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releasedtruth:

Alright, the point may be moot, but it's still fun to debate. I'm looking to build a ~300 dollar replacement for my P4 2.2Ghz, Radeon 9600 Pro MAME pc. I'll be replacing the following items:

Unknowns
Mboard
CPU

Knowns
RAM - 512MB DDR2 533
Case/PS - Aspire X-gear

I've looked at the benchmarks on Toms Hardware (closest to the Duo is a 2.1) and all things being equal the   Duo > Athlon > Pentium D   for most things. The price out the door is 355, 300, 295 respectively. Just as a matter of heresay and conjecture, which would be preferable keeping in mind the divergent prices (Duo being 17% more, etc) End goal is to never update again (maybe more ram) and to jam some 3d games Zinc doesn't support (boost the ones it does).

Kaytrim:

The Intel Duo is the second generation of the dual core processor these two cores are matched by Intel.  The Pentium D is the first generation dual core and the two cores are not as well matched.  I don't know much about the AMD processor though.  Here is a link to an ExtremeTech comparesion of these processors.  Also keep in mind that the Quad cores are due out soon.  ExtremeTech has a review of Intel's quad core processor as well as AMD's quad core.

As far as MAME is concerned you shouldn't get much of a performance boost from dual core or quad core tech as MAME is single threaded for the most part.  The better performance boost would be a nice paired set of ram sticks for a total of 1-2 mb of memory.

releasedtruth:

Hmm, that's a good point to be sure. I'll also use this machine to crunch numbers in matlab when I'm not playing games so I figured if I went Core 2 I would just run it in the 2.2Ghz range and get some serious floating point quickness. Price is a little higher, but seems to make more sense. The quad cores will be insane.

GT

Thenasty:


--- Quote from: Kaytrim on December 19, 2006, 12:23:31 pm ---The better performance boost would be a nice paired set of ram sticks for a total of 1-2 mb of memory.

--- End quote ---


We know what ya mean here  :banghead:  (gb)

clanggedin:

I picked up a Core 2 Duo a few weeks ago and it has sped up my processing power by leaps and bounds when it comes to rendering large images in Photoshop. I had a 2.4ghz P4 with 1.5GB RAM and it would literally take 10 minutes to render a 3' x 5' banner. Now it only takes a few seconds with my core 2 and only 1 GB of RAM.

If you are going to crunch numbers then get a 2 Duo.

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