The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

well the last chipset for that is the P43/P45 so getting a mobo withthat chipset will be ideal, BUT come september, the new LGA 1156 is out.

 

True, but a Q8200, if supported, is a £100 upgrade - a comparable i5 will be a lot more. If it turns out the board is ancient and won't accept any new decent CPUs, wait for a Core i5 and upgrade it then, as that'll be a better idea, but if it will support a newer core 2 quad or even a pentium dual core, do that.

 

I'm sorry i said earlier my board is a Foxconn 945g7ma-8ks2h not that new

 

That's a no then. On that basis, wait until the Core i5s are about (assuming you can) then buy one of those, as you will get a better value system that way.

 

I think i shall just have to stick with my pentinum d or get a celeron then because i won't be able to support a processor that new will i? Also they will be mega bucks

 

You can't really get anything better than your Pentium D - a Celeron would be worse, much worse.

 

Right i shall just stick with what i have then and get the 400w corsair and the raedon hd4850. That should run crysis on mid settings even with my crappy cpu shouldn't it?

 

Yes, medium will be fine as it isn't too CPU limited.

 

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15309/1/

oh man!

4 way SLI with GTX 285s!

 

Not to be a stickler, but I am finding that the term "dual core" confuses everybody, and should not be used if what is really meant are the words "core 2 duo" meaning "the new architecture moving beyond the power hungry netburst architecture of the pentium 4 and pentium D." If that is what you DID NOT mean, then forgive me for putting words in your mouth, Jeff, but I'll explain my confusion:

To my mind, the Celeron is a cheap version of Pentium, usually with less cache, so less performance at same speed.

I know, as a result of recent research, that the Pentium D IS IN FACT DUAL CORE. So to my mind, saying a Celeron dual core will outperform a Pentium Dual Core, is not true. However, you used the adjective "new" in describing celeron.

If by new, you mean core 2 duo, with less cache making it part of the celeron family of cheaper, weaker processors, but still the new architecture which is twice as powerful clock per clock as netburst, then I could see your point. I was not aware that there WERE celeron core 2 duo processors.

Rich

 

What's your point about Dual core? I don't really see where the confusion is between people who know the score. Pentium D is the old crap Intel dual core, Core 2 duo is the new intel dual core, "Pentium Dual Core" is the newest E range for lightweight

CPUs. There are Celeron Dual cores as well based off the Pentium Dual core E series, but even slower with less cache. Celeron Dual cores share nothing with the old Pentium Ds, but are nonetheless dual cores.
The Pentium D is a dual core. Your Pentium 4 670 is NOT a dual core as a Pentium D (note: 800 and 900) is not a Pentium 4 (note: 500 and 600)
The Pentium 4 has one physical core, two threads via HT. The Pentium D has two physical cores, four threads via HT. The Core 2 Duo does NOT have HT. The Core i7 does.
There is no such thing as a 2.4Ghz Pentium D. The lowest speed was the D805 at 2.66Ghz. There was no 3.8Ghz Pentium D due to thermal output, the highest was the D960 at 3.6Ghz, versus the P4 670 at 3.8Ghz. There was no dual core CPU to match the

performance of the 3.8Ghz P4 670 PER-CORE from Inteluntil the Core 2 Duo came along. AMD however had the PD 960 beat with even the Athlon X2 4200+, let alone the 4400,4600 and 4800+ that also arrived at the same time.
Hyperthreading for gaming is a mixed bag. For single cores it might help since most games make use of at least two threads. Since games very rarely make use of eight threads though, using it with an i7 for games almost halves the CPU's processing power.

 

Wow, thanks for bringing that up – you forced me to chase down the meaning of physical and logical and I got some clarification and I will hereby have to amend some of the misstatements in my post.

However, I also discovered, that you are apparently misinformed about the Pentium D.

From all my research, it appears that you, Sam, are confused, the Pentium D does not have hyperthreading.

You said:

But The Pentium lineup says:

So I guess no 4 threads and no hyperthreading for the Pentium D.

That is precisely my point. Thank you for making that misstatement proving that even you are not immune from confusion.

Okay, I think I have it clear now. You can see the 8 cores of the i7 920 chip displayed on your task manager, just like I see the 2 cores of the pentium 4 3.2 ghz (but not my 2.8 pentium 4 on my business machine) displayed on my task manager. You can see the picture of the two cores on the pentium 3.2 and 3.8 670 on a photograph, and you see 8 little tiny cores on a photograph of the i7.

The correct terminology for these little cores is LOGICAL CORE.

The i7 has 8 logical cores, and can carry 8 threads, combining the results of each two into one computation, through the process we know as HyperThreading, which is the word the marketing guys came up for Simultaneous Multi-threading, (SMT) which as I recall was the original name the Intel engineers called the process when they first modified the p4 and doubled the little cores on the chip.

So you can see two cores in a photograph of my p4, and the correct description of each core is Two Logical Cores. My p4 has one physical core which is multi-threaded, through having two logical cores.

The Pentium D was a diversion from hyperthreading, consisting of two physical single-threaded cores, with no hyperthreading. It was brought out as a low-speed (in comparison to p4) relatively cheap $250-range processor (please don’t come back and say it was $269 – I am saying approximately that price) to compete head-on with the AMD 64 bit dual core chip, while the faster 3.8 670 was around $831 at launch, haha.

I don’t know if the pentium D is a true 64 bit cpu – I have a feeling that it is – since I have verified to my satisfaction that the 670 3.8ghz p4 that I just bought is a true 64-bit processor, whereas my 3.2 ghz p4 540, which also has two logical cores and hyperthreading like the 670, is however only a 32-bit processor. However, I don’t know if the 64 bits will buy me anything in extra performance on my 32-bit XP operating system.

Anyway, the gist of my post was that there is a LOT OF CONFUSION everywhere, beyond your little bit of confusion, Sam, about the Pentium D, where you thought it has hyperthreading, beyond my confusion as to the definition of logical core versus physical core.

My post was about exactly that - confusion, and clarification of terminology.

Here’s another example. Take a look at this advert. Do these guys know the score, Sam? Or are they hopelessly confused beyond belief?




Hahaha. And yet the net is filled with this! The forums are filled with it. Confusion everywhere. If I looked at that advert, and if I foolishly believed it, I am being told straight out that Pentium D and core 2 duo are the same thing.

But we all KNOW that is not true, because unlike the guys who put the advert together, WE are in the know – lucky chaps aren’t we?

This following is very minor, Sam, but you said there was no Pentium D at 2.4 ghz. Just google Pentium D 2.4 and see what comes up.



In truth I don't really care if there was a 2.4, versus a 2.66. Who really cares?

My post was about misinformation, and about the bad habit we all have of bandying about expressions and phrases that tend to confuse.

I was confused. I said physical core, thinking if you can see it in a photo, that's something physical, ain't it? But now I see that the generally accepted and therefore correct description is Logical Core. Great, I'm now in the know.

Let's see if I can say this without tripping all over myself. My p4 has two logical cores, which combine into one physical core. Another way of saying it is to say I have one physical processor, supporting two threads, appearing to be two processors, but really just one physical processor with two logical cores.

Assuming I said that without confusion, then I think I have it straight now.

My further point, in reference to Jeff’s advice to Keith, was that dual core is WAY different from core 2 duo. We can all agree on that, right?

Pentium D, whether or not it was ever 2.4ghz versus 2.66, certainly is dual core, and most decidedly is not core 2 duo. Celeron dual core is going to be weaker with less cache than pentium d dual core.

But “new celeron” which was what Jeff was suggesting to Keith, if it is part of the core 2 duo family, might be quite a bit faster, since we all agree that clock for clock, core 2 duo architecture is twice as fast as pentium D. However, google tells me NO. It looks like Jeff was confused about celeron.

(See what I mean about people even as astute as Jeff being capable of confusion?)

I see tons of articles about celeron versus core 2 duo, and laptops that advertise “core 2 duo not celeron”, so I think celeron was not the right advice for Jonathon.

Rich

 

Actually the Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition DID have hyperthreading and would show up as a quad core in task manager. The Pentium D 900 series actually wasn't called Smithfield it was called Presler. They also had double the L2 Cache.

All of the Pentium 4 based processors were never true 64 bit chips. They were modified from the original design to SUPPORT 64 bit. The Athlon 64 based processors though were native 64 bit since the original Clawhammer Opterons found in servers in 2002(not sure exactly when, the tech is really old though I know that).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116092

Confused about what?

Not only do they exist but damn near most of them do 3GHz at stock voltage. And even at stock speed it would stomp all over any but the fastest Pentium Ds. At 3GHz it would embarrass a Pentium D and put it to shame.

I dunno what you looked for on Google but they ARE Core 2 based and they ARE clock for clock faster than an Athlon 64 X2, which clock for clock massacred a Pentium D. I've never done a direct comparison between the Celeron Dual Core and a Pentium D but sheer logic tells me that it's a LOT faster. Remember the AMD64s mostly used 512KB L2 as well and they destroyed the 2MB L2 Prescott Pentium 4s. Cache size is important but not a valid comparison between two completely different chips.

 

*spits tea out* No one gave me any advice about no Intel shizzel. I've got my Athlon! I believe the advice was directed at conb123.

Seriously though the Pentium D is actually slower then the majority of P4s the numbers are there but something is lost in what I can only imagine as a maze inside the chip. The Pentium Dual core on other hand is a stripped back core 2 duo and the new Celeron dual-core is a stripped back Pentium dual-core. See that didn't need a massive post that hurts your scrolling finger

 

Some of the Pentium D CPUs had hyperthreading, not all - correct, I forget which ones as the CPUs were so dire I never gave them much of a detailed look. This is back in the days when the Athlon X2 was giving the Pentium D even more of a beating than the Core 2 Duo did the X2 when it first came out.
You have also only considered the D800 Smithfield series, not the marginally improved D900 Presler series.
The correct term for HT cores is 'logical cores'.
The Pentium D was not intended as a low-speed version, it came out in the same clock speeds as the P4 for all bar one CPU, the 3.8Ghz, which wasn't technically feasible (imagine in much the same way there can be an HD4870X2 but not HD4890X2) Some of them I'm pretty sure were pretty expensive. The Athlon X2s were the really pricey chips though, shortly prior to the Core 2 Duo's release, an X2 4200+ which was only the second of 5 chips in the line, cost £240, more than a Q9650 does now. The reason for this is that the X2 4200+ beat the D960, even at 2.2Ghz vs the 960's 3.6Ghz. The 4400+ with its extra cache took things further, and the 4800+ with extra cache and a 2.4Ghz clock speed obliterated all the Pentium Ds, and maintained the lower 90W power usage, hence its lofty £500 price tag at the time.
The P4 670 was Intel's extreme CPU, as it was the fastest single core CPU they had ever created. Sadly, the Athlon64 FX-53 had been released long before then, which was the extreme precursor to the 4000+, the cheaper mainstream version (think QX9650 vs Q9650)
The Pentium D 900 was 64-bit I'm sure, I can't say about the 800, as the P4 600 series was 64-bit, whereas the P4 500 series wasn't. After the old P4 stuff was dropped, every Intel CPU was 64-bit apart from the Core Duo laptop chips (note: not Core 2 duo)
64-bit CPUs provide NO performance advantages unless on a 64-bit OS, and running 64-bit applications.

As for the things you're posting, they're false adverts. The HP A6838F is powered by a Pentium Dual Core E2220 at 2.4Ghz, this is a 65W Core 2 based chip from the modern generation.
The other advert is simply mislabelled, that is a Core 2 Duo E6600, again, a 65W Conroe chip.

Celeron dual cores are NOT weaker than Pentium Ds - this is because they're based on Pentium Dual core chips, which although are the poor relation to modern Core 2 Duos, Core 2 Duos are so vastly better than Pentium Ds, that even the bargain basement celeron version flattens the fastest Pentium D of yesteryear.

 

WOW! I've never owned a PSU that has come in bubble wrap.... Or of that matter has come with kettle lead, screws, a manual, tie wraps or a sticker. Its matte blackness matches my XFX 4850 :L

Hmmm my PC seems to be working fine now but the voltage is still stupidly low...

 

Jeff, I absolutely owe you an apology - you said "new celeron" and your advice (to conb123 lol) was completely correct.

Wow, I am deciding that I hate the term "dual core" because when one says that, which micro-architecture is one addressing, netburst of prior to 2006, or CORE introduced in 2006?

For that reason, Sam, the ending of your post confused me. Again, because I am on ebay giving some people advice who have older and weaker systems than I have, I see "dual core" on ebay used for pentium d, and also used for core 2 duo. Yes they are both dual core, but one is the new CORE architecture, one is the old netburst architecture.

Here is what one article said:

Truer words were never spoken.

In my mind, after a lot of google and wiki, is that the difference between the two is CORE microarchitecture (more prefetch buffers, wider data path, store ahead although address location still unknown, all kinds of enhancements developed in Israel, and taken from a lot of stuff that AMD was already doing, and which Intel had tried way back to 1995) versus netburst.

So the part of your post, Sam, that confused me was the last paragraph:

Knowing that you like to use the term "dual core" because for "people in the know" that means two modern cores, versus quad which means four modern cores, I added the modifiers below in red:

So now, assuming I am understanding you correctly, the celeron dual core in the newegg that Jeff referred to, the E1600, is the bargain basement version of core 2 duo, therefore at 2.4ghz, it will outperform a netburst-based pentium D of old. If the pentium D had a lot more cache, and was very much faster, possibly it would not be completely obliterated, but at exactly the same cache size it would take more or less a 4.8ghz pentium D to keep up, and stock pentium D never ran that fast because of heat considerations.

In reading about the E1600, apparently it IS a derivative of the Conroe, or Merom CORE architecture, WHICH IS the new architecture that Intel introduced in 2006, leaving behind netburst.

So today we have CORE in its various forms, core 2 duo, core 2 duo quad core, and celeron versions of core 2 duo, such as the Celeron E1600.

So shame on me for what I said, Jeff was not confused, (Again, I apologize, Jeff) he was dead-on accurate - the NEW Celeron (that's exactly what he said "new celeron") is core-based, unlike the old celeron which was netburst-based.

I actually have one of those older netburst celeron 2.4ghz processors in my third business machine. It was purchased around 2006 and has never been used for gaming, and it is very fast for business.

All the laptop ads that I had read, which said "core 2 duo not celeron" (which made me think that celeron was not core 2 duo based) were simply expressing briefly, for marketing purposes, what one could say using a lot more words, such as "Our laptop has true core 2 duo, meaning CORE architecture, with normal large cache, not the stripped-down CORE architecture with less cache comprising today's Celeron chip, which the other laptop guys put in their weaker machines."

Jeff said "new celeron" which was better than just saying celeron, and initially I actually thought maybe he had meant a core 2 duo celeron

(which is what he DID mean) but I couldn't quickly find any confirmation in google of that, and I was thrown off by the laptop ads. ONCE MORE: JEFF DID MEAN A CORE 2 DUO CELERON, AKA A "CORE" CELERON.

So, for clarification, I suppose, like Jeff, one could say "new celeron" or "modern celeron, or "CORE celeron" or "core 2 duo-derived celeron" meaning that we're not talking about older netburst celeron.

By the same token, one could say "new dual core" or "modern dual core" or "dual core CORE" all to indicate that one is not referring to the older "dual core netburst."

For "people in the know" - then fine, no modifier is needed. Who reads this forum thread - just people in the know, or ANYBODY having a question about a graphics card?

Rich

 

Netburst is indeed the simplest way of referring to the old CPUs. It's Smithfield/Presler versus Conroe/Allendale/Wolfdale/Kentsfield/Yorkfield and a couple of others I've probably forgotten (we'll ignore the i7's bloomfield and Lynnfield for now)
Your statement is correct, a 2.4Ghz cheapo celeron will still bust a Pentium D's balls. Merom is not a term that should be used, as it primarily refers to laptops.
Netburst 2.4Ghz Celerons are worlds apart from the 2.4Ghz E series dual cores.

 

Well, now we're getting somewhere. So "netburst" dual core, is NOT today's dual core. "New Celeron" as Jeff aptly put it, is CORE-based, and is not the slow netburst-based celeron of old.

Is there some similar word as "netburst" to denote today's CORE technology, or is that the best word, just "CORE"? I like that word, but I don't know if anybody else does.


RAID ALMOST NO HELP FOR REDUCING LEVEL LOAD TIMES

Completely changing subjects, I can not find anything that indicates that Raid 0 or Raid 1 will help for gaming.

We could talk Raid 1, mirroring, which is supposed to allow reading from both drives at the same time if your controller is smart enough to do that, but let's just talk Raid 0 for now, striping across two disks, which definitely lets your read from two drives at more or less the same time. There is no redundancy, but for gaming it's simple to keep a backup clone copy somewhere to protect against array failure of one drive. And of course you still have all the original game disks, although re-loading all your games is a super pain as I just discovered.

So now, talking only Raid 0 with two disks, there are applications where this type of Raid 0 will increase sequential read rate by virtually 100%.

On one forum while the gaming guys were saying - "doesn't help" - another guy who has to move 25000 jpegs once a week to some other system, says a Raid 0 cut his processing time from 24 minutes down to 12, a 100 improvement in read speed.

But the research I have done to date indicates that game level loading times are hardly improved at all by Raid 0.

I couldn't believe what I was reading - it was so counter-intuitive. But that came up over and over again, in many hours of google research. One great article talked about Raid 0 of two cheap 7200 drives, out-performing a Raptor - but not for game level loading. Many types of applications benefited, but I ignored all of those - I was looking for evidence of a direct benefit for gaming, and I couldn't find it!

Here is the kind of thing that I did find:

For gaming, and loading game levels, if a single disk loaded a level in 35 seconds, maybe the Raid 0 array would cut that down to 34 seconds, for a grand total of a 1 second quicker level load - less than a 5% improvement. Again and again, the same results. Even this one great bench done by a private party on one forum, where his goal was to optimize the stripe size, all indicated the same thing.

Virtually no benefit to game level loading.

Why? Initially, as I said, it absolutely didn't make sense to me. We know that two heads can read twice as fast as one, isn't that right? But finally I found an article that helped me understand what is going on. The article said that the computer isn't really spending all that much time in actually reading in sequential data on a level load.

The computer is reading in very compressed information, which it then has to de-compress and insert correctly in the vram.

I had no idea that textures were deeply compressed on the disk, but that's because I never really thought about it. Now I guess that makes total sense. I guess that explains why crysis only takes up 2 gigs on my hard drive, but Warhead takes up 7 gigs. Does Warhead actually have 3x as many textures? Maybe? Or did they somewhat uncompress the textures on Warhead to try to make the levels load faster? It's the same with Crysis Wars, 7 gigs on the disk. I was astonished that Crysis only takes up 2 gigs - all my other games are bigger than that. (I loaded it but I am not interested in playing it on this rig. I'll let a guest play it however, later, on a smaller screen with reduced settings. When I clone the new disk, all my games will go over to the new rig, and I'll be able to play Crysis in all its glory.)

As I think now about compression, let's take a blueray HD movie, for example. Every frame has more than 2 million pixels, with 3 bytes of color information. So if the frame rate is 25/second, that equals 150 MB/sec of data, and for a 90 minute movie, that's 810 gigs total. The max a blue ray can hold is about 50 gigs, so the minimum compression is 16 to one. Realistically, the data is probably compressed 30 or 40 to one - I think most blue rays are about 25 gigs or so. On jpeg compression, the standard compression with my photo editor was about 35 to one, but I use a higher quality level, which is about 20 to one compression, after I saw some eye color changes on converting some animes from gifs to jpegs.


GAMING TEXTURE COMPRESSION

I suppose gaming textures might be compressed 20-30 to 1 on the disk. I'm just guessing. If you have a 1 gig vram buffer, you aren't going to change 100% of that texture information on a level load, are you? Let's say you change half the textures, or around 500 MB. If you have a slower disk with a read rate of 30MB/sec, like most of my drives, it would take 17 seconds to read the uncompressed texture information and load the vram. But if the data is compressed 20 to one, it would take only 1 second.

So if we're seeing level loads taking 30 seconds, and a Raid 0 array reduces that by only 1 second faster, maybe the actual sequential read time is only a few seconds at most - the rest of the time is computer processing. That's why your wonderful sequential read speeds don't help you load those levels much faster.

I just cloned to a 500 gig western digital at 7200 rpm. According to HD Tach and HD Tune, it has a sequential read rate of 80-90 MB/sec, well above all my other disks on all my other machines - about 5 other disks, which come in around 30 MB/sec. I haven't started up playing Left 4 Dead again - I will soon - and I will be interested in seeing how fast the levels load for me with this drive, versus the two 7200 seagates that I had in Raid 0. (They went back in their box after I lost the sata controller through increasing my fsb from 200 to 210 to juice the p4 a bit, lol. So I haven't done HD Tach on those - but seeing some stuff on the web indicates they get good read rates - 80 or 90MB/sec or so like the WD.) Sam, I think you said something about 75MB/sec, so these seem like decent read rates. I read a review of my 500 gig WD, and it performed very well against the Raptor in certain applications including gaming, although the Raptor has the best access time of all the drives.

Anyway, I am very surprised to find myself now saying that I have done a 180 degree shift in my thinking regarding Raid. Unless I can be convinced otherwise through all new data, I am falling in line with the people who say that for gaming, you won't see any real benefit of Raiding an array.

What I am hearing, is that depending on how many games you actually have (in my case well under 100 gigs) just get 1 reasonably fast drive, maybe even a Raptor, and beef up your processor and memory.

Rich

 

Well 500GB just for my OS/games drive is getting a little cramped lately. So Ideally you want 1TB for storage and 1TB for OS/Games on a high end machine or possibly a fast 1TB and a fileserver from which to install. Ideally eliminating your ODD in the process >.>

Just from my experience. My Crossfire machine mainly plays games and I have nearly every one I own installed and it's getting a bit cramped. 100GB of space left with maybe 40 modern games installed plus countless emulators, legacy games, my OS and all my programs. If I install maybe 10 more games I'm getting into nearly full territory which isn't good for an OS drive. And I have almost 20 modern sized games still on my 1TB in the quad core file server.