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Hardware upgrade for FS !?
EHM-0654 Jean:
--- Quote ---Originally posted by EHM-1703 Philip
Robert
Firstly.... STOP.... Put Your Wallet firmly back in your pocket!!!!!
Much as I don't want to disagree with Murray, playing the waiting game is not always the best idea when it comes to CPU's.
--- End quote ---
(Bugger...)
First off, I'll agree with everything Phil said. Intel deffo have the ball firmly in their court, and to be honest it'll have to be them making a royal balls up for AMD to get it back now. And again, SLI is a total waste of money right now, there's nothing out there that needs it (even FSX); when the add-ons market catches up, then maybe, but right now RAM/CPU will get you way more performance benefits in FSX.
*BUT*, wait until the end of the month at the very least before commiting to a processor/system... Intel have announced their end of month price cuts, hang on just a couple of weeks and you'll be able to purchase at these (in some cases, significantly) lower prices:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/05/15/intel_desktop_d-day/
and slightly in advance of the cut "going live":
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-143-IN
Shame I want a Q6700 really ;)...
--- Quote ---Admittedly AMD have been far slower to release, but a little research will show that Intel already have next gen products in testing that will keep up with if not outperform the Phenom! (The Phenom is touted as 2 core and 4 core whilst Intel currently have 8 more cpu's in testing for release before the end of the year!)
--- End quote ---
Weeellll... Barcelona as a technology is roadmapped out to 32 cores already, and socket-wise, Phenom will be backward compatible well into 2009 (Socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3 are pin layout identical, the only thing that's changing is power requirement) The "big thing" about Barcelona (or more specifically, AMD's multi-core methodology) is that it is ground-up symetric multi processor - the current Intel technology is a series of dual-core units "stitched together" on a die - hence "Core 2 quad"; a pair of Core 2 processors cores yielding four cores total. Intel has shared memory between the cores in a single dual-core unit, but not between core units; AMD share memory between all cores (or, true SMP if you prefer). AMD have always enjoyed a faster FPU than Intel, but Intels integer math unit stomps AMDs (and they can push their core technology to far higher clock speeds)
If, and it's a huge if at this point, AMD have got it right, their solution should be as fast for significantly lower core speeds (and reduced power usage/cooling requirements), but until August (at the earliest) you've no way of knowing for sure... I'm keeping an open mind since I'm not buying CPU/Shuttle mobo until Xmas, but I fully expect to be going Intel with this one (and yes, I do consider myself an AMD fanboi)
Oh, and I doubt FSX will need any additional tweaking to work with Barcelona/Phenom, it's the underlying OS that deals with the processors; especially in Vista :) MS have got it thread optimised now, so it should see performance gains on all multi-thread/multi-processor systems.
(Murray)
EHM-1001 Robert:
Well,
I can tell you that I do not plan to buy a new computer this year. My little big dream is a fine 32" LCD TV instead ;D I opened this thread only, because I got a new PC in the office and I was dissapointed with its performance.
I am not a professor and not so open minded in the new technologies as you. What I see (and believe) are the forums and benchmarks on the net. What I red, that at many games, SLI did increased the performance, at 60...80%. But not at FS9 !!! Although I believe too, that the programmer of OS and game should work in harmony to use the hardware as much as possible, it seems there are even 2 worlds. I mean, we can see from benchmarks, that SLI or duo-core technology does not help on FS9, but it helps at many other (usually the run'n'gun) games. Perhaps the situation is different with Vista+FSX ... or later will happen at FS11 ;D
I have an electric engineer colleague who is also a talented programmer, and he said, that the Intel duo-core processors came too fast, and neither the hardware or software surrounding can support it as it would need. This means of course less performance as we expected. Probably that is what we can see in the office on our design software. And that is why I will try to install the program on Vista and 4GB RAM. I will tell you about the results later ;)
Thank you for the detailed descriptions ;)
EHM-0654 Jean:
--- Quote ---Originally posted by EHM-1703 Philip
Now as for your CPU issues...... Well I am not sure how it is done but there are ways of manually assigning tasks to cores on your CPU.
--- End quote ---
One last one before I leave for the airport... this mechanism is called "Processor Affinity" by MS. No idea how you tell XP/Vista to do it, but on the server OSs (2000 and 2003), there was a wee program that came with the resource kit that allowed you to set affinity.
EDIT: Ugh... Vista comes with WSH scripts to perform affinity:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2056395_set-windows-vista-processor-affinity.html
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