Laptop to Desktop time

[undercovergeek]

So my laptop is sat on a desktop with speakers and hardly moves - it may as well be a desktop that i can upgrade as time goes by.............

So im looking at an I5 with a Nvidia 2 GB graphics card and 8mb of hyper x genesis ram - surely the chip and the GPU and the RAM are the bottleneck causers in any system?

I can see a 30-50 pounds difference between the i5 and the i7 - is the i7 that much more amazing - i know you could look at this the other way round but the MB i swas looking at it optimised for i5 and not i7 meaning another 70 pounds on that too

any help gratefully accepted

[bob48]

I think you'll be better off with an i7 if you afford it. I've recently gone from a core duo to a quad core i5 (3.0mhz) and the difference was, as you would expect, startling. Also 6mb cache, and 8Gb RAM. Its running W7 64bit so it can use all the RAM.

I've never been a great AMD fan, always having a preference for nVidia, but this rig (its a refurb) came with an AMD 6670 with 2 Mb RAM, and, whilst its nothing startling, the whole thing seems to run reasonably well for most games.

For example, I run FSX with pretty high setting and for most of the time achieve 24fps.

I think its always going to be the case with desktops - bung in the best hardware that you can afford, especially when it comes to the mobo, CPU and RAM. Whatever you do, its gonna be out-of-date after 2 years........

[undercovergeek]

yeah - i know the feeling with the out of date thing - this has altered the way im looking at this - ive priced up a rig with an i7 at £1000 - nice too, BUT..................

im looking at my laptops desktop - CMBN, CMFI, CK2, Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, Pride of Nations, Warlock - i wouldnt even tickle an i5 never mind an i7, no FPS, no flight sims, no Skyrims and RPGs, im wondering if my aspirations are a little grand

Althought the rome 2 TW screenshots make me pointy

[Greybriar]

How timely. Tom's Hardware just released its review: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: August 2012.

[Bison]

I've been looking at new computer parts myself lately.  I think the i5 is fine for almost all gaming today, because very few games are optimized or even coded to use more than a single core.  The CPU bottleneck that you have in some games is that the bulk of the processing is done on the processer and not the gpu.  So a faster chip is better in this case.  Originally the i5 had faster single chip boost speeds than i7, so they actually handled many cpu dependent games better. That difference is less noticable now.  I think for gaming an i5 will more than do the trick, but it you want to get some future proofing the i7 is the way to go if you can afford it IMO.  Or if you do any sort of music/video editting the i7 will also give you more power.

You also have games that use the gpu more effectively and that is where the bottleneck can occur, but scaling graphics can solve many issues.  The graphics card is sort of a what you can afford deal too.  A GTX 560 Ti or GTX 560 is a really good card that is pretty reasonably priced at least here in the states not sure what you are looking at in the UK.  You could then wait a year or two and upgrade to a new card that has been on the market for awhile at lower cost.  Or you can start will a higher performance boost with the GTX 670 or GTX 680 but pay for it upfront.

RAM get a min of 4 GB and you are good to go.  RAM is very cheap these days and you can always add more later, but games are only going to use so much RAM.  So unless you are doing alot of multitasking or editting 4 GB works.

[junk2drive]

Keep in mind that a 32 bit OS will only use 3.25 mb of ram.

There is a discussion at wargamer that multi core CPUs rated at x mhz will divide that number by the number of cores, or not.

I can't find anything for sure. Anybody know?

On the one hand, I would expect a 4 core 3.0 to run each core at 3.0 but ghostryder states that 4x3=12 would melt down the computer and really you only get 4/3=1 max from each core.

[Bison]

Each core runs at the mhz regular and hyperthread.  Whether or not your program will take advantage of multi-cores is another issue.  They distribute the processing over several cores, which in effect would be using X amount of processing on Core 1 and X amount on Core 2 so on.  It's that distribution that gives the processing power greater than a single core.  At least thats my understanding.  Shelldrake or Migs could give a more techinical explanation for sure.

[junk2drive]

I have an AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0mhz. I assumed that single core apps would run at 3 and Panzer Command that uses multicores would use both cores at a max of 3 for one, the other, or both, as needed.

[bob48]

Its a very good point though; not matter how good your spec is, much depends on how well the software is configed to take advantage of what you are running.

[LongBlade]

Its a very good point though; not matter how good your spec is, much depends on how well the software is configed to take advantage of what you are running.

It also depends on what genres you want to play.

If you're a big FPS gamer like me, an i7 make a lot of sense. OTOH if you're mostly playing stuff like Warlock then having a major processor isn't as big a priority.

I play pretty much everything, and sometimes travel, too, so my preferred gaming rig is a laptop. I would *love* to have a big screen and a desktop. At some point it's probably going to happen, but I've still got probably a year of gaming life left on this rig so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade.

[Bison]

Most wargames that come from the Matrix/Slitherine lineup are more cpu dependent than gpu for example.  A perfect example of a game that bottlenecks even on new systems is Sim City 4.  It uses cpu processing for everything, but it only uses one core.  So even a modern chip only gets marginally better performance than an old intel pentium chip.

[Bison]

I have an AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0mhz. I assumed that single core apps would run at 3 and Panzer Command that uses multicores would use both cores at a max of 3 for one, the other, or both, as needed.

I didn't realize that Panzer Command was coded to use multiple cores.  Learn something new everyday.

[LongBlade]

I have an AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0mhz. I assumed that single core apps would run at 3 and Panzer Command that uses multicores would use both cores at a max of 3 for one, the other, or both, as needed.

I didn't realize that Panzer Command was coded to use multiple cores.  Learn something new everyday.

Yes, IIRC the devs won an obscure but big technical award from either Microsoft or Intel (or both) for it's innovative use of microthreading. I can try to hunt up a press release I wrote on WG if you'd like to read it.

[junk2drive]

That was 2006 and it was Intel. One of the programmers stated that it likes as many cores as you can get. However a lot of people complained about poor performance on high end rigs. My problem turned out to be graphics card related. A modest ATI 5670 1g made a huge difference. Other people have better cards but other parts slow them down.

CMx2 only uses one core and when people have a multicore @ around 2 it doesn't run any better than an old single core machine.

[Bison]

That was 2006 and it was Intel. One of the programmers stated that it likes as many cores as you can get. However a lot of people complained about poor performance on high end rigs. My problem turned out to be graphics card related. A modest ATI 5670 1g made a huge difference. Other people have better cards but other parts slow them down.

CMx2 only uses one core and when people have a multicore @ around 2 it doesn't run any better than an old single core machine.

Exactly.  That's why i5 processers were able to outperform the first i7 models.  The i5 was clocking in with hyperthread at like 3.5-3.8 but the i7 was like 3.2.  So on a single core application the i5 got better results.  That gap has now been closed with Sandy Bridge processors, which is why I think if you want time proofing Sandy Bridge i7 *might* in the long term (4-5 years at most) give a system more staying power with only having to upgrade to a new gpu at the halfway point of your rigs life if you plan on keeping it for 5 years or so.