I'm looking at upgrading my processor and am curious if anything is gained (or lost) by going duo core over single core?
Currently I'm running with an Athlon64 3000+ in a rig with 2G of Mushkin high performance ram and a 7900GTO graphics card. I mainly 3 box in EQ1 and the new expansion can cause some pretty bad slow downs even with medium settings.
It has gotten bad enough that I've thought about running a second rig, but hate to give up the single keyboard and mouse. Would going dual core and adding a second vid card and monitor gain me much?
Thanks for any advice.
Single core or duo core
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I'm pretty sure somebody else posted more-or-less the same question here a few days ago, and Lax gave a fairly detailed response. You might want to check through the posts from the past week or so. FWIW, here's my 2 cents:
Even the dual-core alone without the 2nd video card would give you a noticable performance boost, especially for the specific task of multi-boxing EQ. From my own experience, my box with a hyper-threaded CPU stomps the hell out of the Athlon64 with in all-other-ways superior specs (beter motherboard, better graphics) that I built right around the same time, and everything I've seen and read would lead me to expect that duo core performance has a leg up on that.
An area to avoid is SLI (I'm not enough on cards to know if that's even an option with the GTO) which seems to me to be just a scam to sell more Nvidia cards and the oem motherboard chips to drive them. It won't help at all running 2 processes at once, and the single-process gains are minimal in my opinion (it lets you do a wee bit more anti-aliasing and other gravy without losing any FPS..big woop) I'm not sure how a 2nd independant card would do, but I suspect it could smooth things out, especially with the duo core chip....I believe this is something Lax addresses here fairly often and in greater detail.
As for a second monitor/rig, you can get a keyboard/video/mouse switch for fairly reasonable prices these days and keep your single keyboard/mouse, just be sure to research them well and read any consume reviews before you pick one. Quite a few of them are prone to mouse lockups and/or have a long (multi-second) delay when switching, long enough to get you owned multi-boxing a game.
Long-story-short, I'd definitely go with the duo core, and possibly a 2nd card fed into the same monitor with a switch.
Even the dual-core alone without the 2nd video card would give you a noticable performance boost, especially for the specific task of multi-boxing EQ. From my own experience, my box with a hyper-threaded CPU stomps the hell out of the Athlon64 with in all-other-ways superior specs (beter motherboard, better graphics) that I built right around the same time, and everything I've seen and read would lead me to expect that duo core performance has a leg up on that.
An area to avoid is SLI (I'm not enough on cards to know if that's even an option with the GTO) which seems to me to be just a scam to sell more Nvidia cards and the oem motherboard chips to drive them. It won't help at all running 2 processes at once, and the single-process gains are minimal in my opinion (it lets you do a wee bit more anti-aliasing and other gravy without losing any FPS..big woop) I'm not sure how a 2nd independant card would do, but I suspect it could smooth things out, especially with the duo core chip....I believe this is something Lax addresses here fairly often and in greater detail.
As for a second monitor/rig, you can get a keyboard/video/mouse switch for fairly reasonable prices these days and keep your single keyboard/mouse, just be sure to research them well and read any consume reviews before you pick one. Quite a few of them are prone to mouse lockups and/or have a long (multi-second) delay when switching, long enough to get you owned multi-boxing a game.
Long-story-short, I'd definitely go with the duo core, and possibly a 2nd card fed into the same monitor with a switch.
Dual core is going to be a massive improvement, for multiple sessions. Second video card + monitor running independently would work great, if you can get two AGP/PCI-e cards running independently in your system. If one has to be PCI, you're probably just as well off just using the secondary display on your current video card, assuming it has dual output.