Yet another hardware thread

Hi,
I'm currently thinking about upgrading my whole hardware, as I'm still running a motherboard with AGP an an old AMD 3000+ CPU.

My question now is:
What is better, an Intel Core 2 Duo or an Intel Core 2 Quad?
I mean does today's software use a Quad Core CPU efficiently?

The configuration I think about getting (shouldn't be too expensive):
Mainboard: ASUS P5K/EPU (socket 775, max 1600 Mhz FSB)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (4x 2400 Mhz)
compatible Ram (2 Gig in 2x 1 Gig sticks, as I'm still running XP)
Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD4850 512MB Sapphire PCI-Express
Power Supply: a 500 W should be enough?

thanks for any hints regarding this configuration and any advice, as I'm not into hardware stuff that much.

Thanks in advance!
xarthor

@CPU:
If a Quad Core makes sense for you depends on what software you actually use. You'll only find a broad support for this on sectors like Rendering, Encoding and things like that. Games and most other pieces of software still struggle to use two cores for good and that will also change in a rather slow manner (although when talking about games it may go faster on the RTS and racing genre - don't know if you like to play those games a lot)...

On the other side when talking about games the GPU will become the bottleneck first anyway so you shouldn't worry about the CPU too much. So until you've made clear in which way you want to use your PC there hardly can be made a recommendation on this...

@Mainboard:
Although a bit more expensive I'd go for an Asus P5Q Pro featuring a more modern chipset (slightly upgraded features and less power consumption) plus a way nicer board layout...

@Power Supply:
Any quality power supply above 400W should be enough here...

Final thoughts:
Well there are two things I want to add here:
1.)
If it's possible I'd wait a bit longer because Intel will release their new "Nehalem" CPU generation which might be quite nice but features an entire new socket & chipset so you won't be able to use any of those CPUs if you buy a system now.

2.)
I'd really start to think about using an AMD system. It has quite some advantages: You can get a good mainboard and memory a bit more cheap and their CPUs aren't that bad and give you a good price performance ratio. The main advantage is that you'll be able to use new CPUs with that system for quite some time as they will be downwards compatible. That might be extremely interesting when looking at how long you've kept your current system - you could do a decent upgrade that way without buying an entirely new system...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

I just asked this question a few weeks back and just went through a major upgrade. I learned quite a bit in the process.

What you get depends on several factors. For example, as you mentioned, if you are running a 32-bit OS then you are limited to 3 GB of RAM. Therefore you won't need a motherboard that supports 16GB. However, if you are planning on going to either XP 64-bit or Vista 64-bit, then you might want to plan ahead and get a motherboard that will allow you to put a lot more RAM in it.

The Asus P5K motherboard is a great motherboard, but there are a few cautions. One is that the board is about a year old. As a result, so is the technology. I had this board in my machine about two days ago and ran into a problem. I have Vista 64-bit installed and put 8 gigs of RAM in (this board supports up to 8 gigs). However, I could never boot into Windows with 8 gigs. It would only boot in with 6. While the board itself was great, it limited me in this way. If you were ever planning on going to 8 GB of RAM then you would need to be aware of this possible problem.

The Asus P5Q, on the other hand, is a much newer and better board. It will support up to 16 GB of RAM with no problems. This is the board I am running at the moment. Currently I only have 8 GB installed, but it runs great.

Both boards are great (the P5K and the P5Q), but there are a couple of other differences to note. The P5K is an SLI board with slots for two (or three?) PCI-E cards to be run via SLI. As a result, the board has an Nvidia chipset. The P5Q is NOT an SLI board and has an Intel chipset. If you are planning on running SLI at some time in the near future (i.e. running more than one video card working together via SLI) then you don't want to get the P5Q. However, if SLI is not an issue for you, then the P5Q is a great board.

One other point of difference is the P5Q is ready for the 45nm CPUs (i.e. the Q9500, etc). So it supports both the 65nm and 45nm chips. Therefore the P5Q allows you to easily upgrade the CPU in the future should you want to. I believe the P5K only supports the 65nm CPUs. You could run the Q6600 on either board, but you would not be able to upgrade to a 45nm CPU on the P5K.

As far as your power supply, what you get will depend on several factors, especially your video card. I purchased one of those Nvidia 9800 GX2 cards and a 500 watt power supply was not really enough. I currently have 850 watts. Getting a big power supply won't hurt and it will allow you to easily upgrade other components in your system should you need to (i.e. bigger video cards, faster RAM, etc). If the power supply is too small then it can cause a slow down in your system (RAM can run more slowly, etc). So getting a decent power supply is a must. I would think that 500 watts is a minimum these days.

the Q6600 is a great CPU and they say it can be overclocked very nicely. It has a nice cache (8 mb) but is a bit slower than some of the 45nm CPUs. However, my previous CPU was a PIV 3.2 GHz and I can safely say that the Q6600 (my current CPU) is blazingly fast in comparison. I am very happy with it. Get a good heat sink to keep it cool. In fact, fans for everything (even your video card) and your system will run well.

As far as RAM is concerned: RAM is fairly cheap these days. If you are running a 32-bit OS then go ahead and get 3 GB instead of two. Why not? It will make a difference. If you get the P5K then it can take up to 2GB sticks and has four DIMM slots (pay attention to the problem I noted above, though). You can run three sticks of 1 GB each without a problem with this board. Two sticks will work, but with the fairly low price of RAM, why not add the extra stick?

I cannot talk about the video card you have selected because I have been an Nvidia user since the beginning and have never had an ATI card. I have heard good things about that card, though. The 9800 GX2 that I have is a great card because it is basically two cards in one (two GPUs and 1 GB of RAM). As a result, I was able to easily move around over 9 million polygons in my 3D application with my current set up while I was capping off around 250,000 with my previous one. The 9800 GX2 allows you to run in SLI mode (i.e. both chips and RAM powering one monitor) or separate them to run two monitors. I tried separating them to see how much slower things were in my 3D app and found that I was getting slow downs at about 2 million polygons. Somehow this card is significantly faster (2 million vs. 9 million) when both chips work together. I am telling you this because, whatever video card you get, do your research because it can drastically affect realtime 3D performance.

Well, I hope this has helped somehow.

Well that unfortunately is a wide spread rumor which is not true. When using just one graphics card you'll rarely need more than 400-450W (that excludes those two chips on one PCB cards because they of course have a higher power consumption too just as the same disadvantages of such dual combos). The only thing you have to take care of is to actually use a quality power supply and not like let's say one from LC Power who really produce quite a lot of poor supplies. I for example have a Phenom 9850 with a HD4870 running with "just" a Seasonic S12-430 (-> 430 watts) and it's all fine. If you want to know some numbers of how much an insane high-end and overclocked system needs just look here:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardw...istungsaufnahme

When talking about recommendations for power supplies I'd go for either be quiet's E5 series, Seasonic's S12 series or Enermax's 82+ series. They all are of very good quality, have a high efficency and run very silent...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Notice that the ATI 4850 (the card that Xarthor said he was looking to get) was going to consume 290 at IDLE according to the link you provided. My card (Nvidia 9800 GX2) requires a 500 watt power supply (according to the specs for the card). More than the video card will draw power, btw. So even 290 is quite a bit (at idle at that). Also, if Xarthor plans to upgrade his video card or other components at a later date he may find that he needs a bigger power supply. If so, then he spends more money because he has to replace the one he already has (if he purchases something now that is less than 500 watts). Also, RAM can slow down if the power supply is not quite sufficient for the system. More RAM: more power draw. It cannot hurt to get a larger power supply and the price difference is not always that great. I was not suggesting a 1200 watt power supply, but 500 watts or better.

because ram banks should be equipped symmetrically to take advantage of the dual channel architecture.

power undersupply won't make your system slower but unstable (random restarts and such things).



i would also go for a quad core cpu. i recently got a q6700 and it's great. not only for rendering and video encoding but also for games. for example physics (like newton) often can make use of multiple cores.

(i also only have a 450 watt power supply.)

Ehm, no you must have misread something - it's 290 under load and 157 when idling. Also remember that on the one side the test system consist of a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 clocked @4GHz (!) and on the other side the given values already include the power supplie's inefficency (so you have to subtract quite a bunch to get the REAL consumption)...


Well my recommendation would be around 450 watt - to go up one step to 500 also woulnd't be a disaster but more than that would be quite a waste (because of the reserves you now see it has)...


Well RAM really has a tiny consumption - regular modules should take like 2-3 watt each so nothing to worry about...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

For stability reasons I would still recommend a power supply of about 500-750Watt. A HD4870 and Q6600 is a different story than with a Phenom 9850 (a processor I wouldn't recommend as it's not quite as fast as Intel's competitor).

As far as mainboard goes, you'll have to think about whether you want to jump on the DDR3 bandwagon any time soon. The newer RAM is worth it in terms of performance, however it's mad expensive to get even just 4 Gb in comparison to DDR2 ram.

I personally wouldn't bother buying a Vista 64-bit OS, but word has it it works better and better in terms of programs supporting 64bit.

The statement that games still struggle with dual cores and quad cores is total nonsense by the way. All Xbox360, PS3 games and just about every PC game released after 2006 are able to handle dual cores and quad cores just fine, taking full advantage of them. They really use multi cores more and more effectively, some games do this better than others, but you'll notice heaps of difference between a Quad Core running Crysis and Dual Core running Crysis... In fact there's usually a massive 40% to 60% increase of performance. Price-wise you can't go wrong with a Q6600 or newer quad core either...

Cheers

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

I've seen higher (depending on where you look). It depends on the sticks, the amount of memory per stick, etc. But, you are correct, it is not a great deal. However, the CPU needs power as well (duh!). The Q6600 can require 100 watts (or more) under a heavy load (not at idle). If you are running something heavy (like a decent 3D game, for example) and you have both the video card pumping and the CPU, then you begin to draw some serious watts. Add to this the RAM (as previously mentioned) and other little things that are drawing power and it all adds up.



From what I have read (and from talking to a few tech guys) it can. For example, using the Windows Vista Windows Experience Index we were able to bump the number upward from 4.6 to 5.0 on a particular PC by installing a larger power supply. The reason for he first number (4.6) was due to RAM speed (the Windows Experience Index gives the overall number based on the lowest number ... in this case the RAM was the lowest at 4.6).



Yes, you are correct and two of them would be used in parallel. He could, if he wanted to, install two 1 GB sticks (in parallel) and two 512 MB sticks (in parallel). This would give him the three gigs and take advantage of the dual architecture as well.

Great to get an estimate, but it's usually on the high side... My system uses about 804Watt according to that calculator, but I have a 750Watt power supply and it's rarely running in the 700+ Watt area. Never had stability issues.

Well what's your point here? Why is a Phenom 9850 which consumes more power than a Q6600 plus a HD4870 which consumes way more power than a HD4850 being a different story? With that said your 500 watt plus recommendation is a bit off the scale...

When talking about speed differences there are no huge differences between a 9850 and a Q6600. The Phenom is faster on these applications and the Q6600 on those applications. So the Phenoms disadvantage is the power consumption while the advantage is the cheaper price for mainboard and memory plus downwards compatibility for future CPU designs to come...


There's hardly a difference between DDR3 and DDR2 RAM except for the fact that DDR3 is way more expensive...


I'd just make sure that there are 64bit drivers for all your components (especially printers and scanners) existant so you actually can use them...


Well I'm sorry but this is totally wrong. Currently we just have reached the state where most titles support two cores. There still are extremely few games that really support four cores and even if they do things like 40 to 60% increase is just insane (as you can't really parallelize games to such an extent). The only examples of a good use of a quad core is Supreme Commander (although the difference isn't THAT big here), Assasin's Creed and Race Driver Grid (which actually reacts pretty good with four cores). With that I'm talking about a siutation actually being real and not some benchmarks at 640x480 with all settings at low. The GPU still becomes the bottleneck way faster (especially with AA and AF) and so you in most cases better use a Dual Core with higher clocks which doesn't really make a difference in modern games and is faster in games which don't use four cores yet. I also don't see the broad use of four cores coming THAT fast. I mean have a look at how long it took to have a dual core support about everywhere. Quads are something only a rather tiny percentage of users own already and so it'll take quite a while until you'll find such a support in nearly every game.

You now can think of getting a quad now if you want to keep it for quite a while (under the presumption you'll mainly use the PC for gaming). On the other hand you won't really have a huge advantage from that as your graphics card will limit you way sooner in coming games. So from a gamer's point of view it makes more sense to switch to a Dual Core with high clock and spend the money into a better graphics card like a HD4870...

To prove what I said have a look at these benchmarks:
Assasins Creed
Crysis
Unreal Tournament 3

EDIT:

I still don't see your point. Well even if we pretend that the Q6600 would drain 100 watts (which it doesn't because TDP is not power consumption) and the HD4850 like 120 watts then we end up with 220. Add up all the rest which are quite small consumers and you still should end up below 300 watts. So why is my recommendation of around 450 watts not enough or not appropiate. I even could get a tad lower but as you (I think it was you) said why not keep some room for the futre...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

I have no intention of arguing with you about numbers, percentages and what more, but those graphs show how the GPU in those games become the bottleneck, not how much a multi-core increases performance in those games.

As said using a Q6600 or a Core 2 Duo 6600 to run Crysis makes a lot of difference. I could list many many more games in which I've experienced myself that it matters, but I feel it would be pointless.



As far as this game is concerned.. it's obvious it's not optimized for quad cores, but more so for single or dual cores... so yeah, doh, not much benefit of quad cores there. It's still pretty likely that the game will run better on a quad core still as background processes could run on different threads and so on.



A good quad core really isn't all that expensive anymore. A good 3D card will easily be far more expensive if you choose right.



Because it won't run.. simple as that. A HD2900XT, Core 2 Duo and 350Watt power supply WON'T boot. I know this, because I've actually thought the same thing, tried it and found out I had to buy a bigger PSU. You're pretty stubborn aren't you?

Also, why else do you think that Nvidia and AMD/ATI both recommend much higher PSUs, especially with Quad Core high-end PCs and multiple graphics cards... even for single card setups the bare minimum is about 450Watt,

Cheers

Huh? I have not run into a single problem running any of my 32-bit components under Vista 64-bit. I have an older Canon scanner, an older Canon printer, a Netgear wireless WiFi PCI card, etc and the drivers are all 32-bit for them. However, they function quite fine. That is not to say that there isn't something somewhere out there that will refuse to run, but I have not had this problem.

About the quad core issue:

While an application may not be designed to take advantage of a quad core, that does not mean it is a waste to get one. Since there are four cores you can run four apps (if you like) at full efficiency (each one taking advantage of a core) and zip right along. However, for those applications that DO take advantage of it ... well ... then you will certainly see another advantage.

As was already pointed out: quad core prices are not very high these days (not at the lower end). Unless you want the latest and greatest CPU then the price is very nice (as much or less than a decent video card). I know my video card was much more than the CPU.

Well I don't understand what you want to prove with this. You say a quad core gives you more performance but admit at the same time that a former high-end GPU already limits in today's games but still don't think it's a good idea in such a situation to invest more into the GPU if you're a gamer? Quite contradictory...


I didn't explicitly mention Call of Duty 4 at all so why are you arguing about it? It actually proves my point of little state-of-the-art games having a quad core support now that you mention it...

And even for those tests where the quad core is better - you do know how this was tested? They just "deactived" some cores of their quad core and so they kept the clock. Because of this the difference will be smaller in reality (without OC at the same level) because dual cores have higher clocks. With that said and looking at it price per price you can get an E6850 clocked at 3GHz for the same price as an Q6600 clocked at 2,4GHz (plus the small Penryn advantage for the E6850 making it some percent faster). As today's games currently gain more from higher clocks rather than additional cores this is why you'll mostly find dual core recommendations in hardware forums when the situation is like here and you're a gamer on a budget...


In this example here it's the recommendation to choose a dual core from the E-series (or an AMD alternative if that's wanted) and go for a HD4870 instead of the HD4850. Makes more sense for a gamer as you indirectly admitted...


Well first - if a power supply features 350 watt or even more this doesn't say a system like the one you mention will boot at all. There are other very important features like especially the 12V trail and how many Ampere you have there (and the number of trails if there are more than one). So tell me which power supply you tried with that system and give its specs...

That's also the reason why get such high watt numbers for the graphics cards: The problem is modern cards really have way higher requirements (especially on that 12V trail I mentioned) and so they had to make sure that nobody will try to run their new system on an "ancient" system and so they gave those high watt numbers because those power supplies most likely would deliver what was needed. You can also see this when comparing what was told to have when you did SLI with two 6800 GT back then and what you are told nowadays. Although the power consumption of the GPUs really went up there is little to no difference (I don't know the exact numbers people were told) between the recommendations today and back then. You also can look up power supply proceedings in forums. When it's about old supplies apart from the watt it can deliever there also comes (i.e. should) the question about the 12V trail. Today you'll rarely find people with such an issue but back then you really had to ask if the 12V trail could deliver around - well let's say 18-20A or not. If not the system most likely didn't boot even if the supply had 500 watts or more...

Apart from that I'm not stubborn: Not only does my system prove you wrong but I'm also a moderator in a hardware board for some years and have recommended dozens of systems (if not hundreds up to today) with such dimensions and guess what: There never ever came back a bad review like "this system doesn't boot". Simply because you have to know which specs or recommendations to trust and which not and power supplies was one of the more special topics because people didn't simply fall into the "watt delusion" (which means more watt = better the producers advertised) but also didn't give the power supply much attention giving this an often too tiny budget buying some "junk" with high watt-numbers printed on it (which it couldn't deliver in reality at all)...

So you see my knowledge isn't based on rumors but facts and has been proven for many many times. Just don't believe everything you're told - there is so much "bullshit" out there. Things get tagged as "silent", people compare the dB numbers the producers give to compare the noise it makes - the list goes on and on and I think you too know some other examples for this...


Well you're lucky then - you'll find lots of people using old (well "old" depends on how you define it) pieces of hardware who just can't get their things to run under Vista 64Bit and that's why my standard recommendation here still is to check if all your stuff will run and if not if you really need a 64Bit Vista at all...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Woah!
Thanks a lot guys! Thats a lot of information in here and I'll surely consider it when doing some further research about the best buy.

Ok so it depends on the use of my system.
Well I'll mostly use it for gaming and game development, whereas I'm a scripter/programmer so I'll not use it for heavy rendering or high poly modeling.

The thoughts I grabbed from here are:
- Better get a 550 oder even 600 Watt power supply, as its long-lasting, and yes I currently have a 400 Watt enermax liberty and consider to buy either an enermax again or a "be quiet".
- Multi-cores are still not 100% supported, so a dual core with high speed should be sufficient.
I guess I'll take a look at the AMD CPUs, as I'm quite happy with my current CPU which is an AMD Athlon64 3000+
- I also consider taking a different motherboard, which might be somewhat more expensive, but longer lasting and better for upgrading in the future.

The problem with the motherboards is, that the P5K is one of the few motherboards having more than 2 SATA ports for drives. Most other motherboards have also more but thoses are connected to some sort of RAID chipset. So I'm not sure if they can also be used for single devices, as I'm not looking for a RAID solution.
My plan, or rather dream, is to grab a SSD (16 or 32 Gig, way enough) and use that one for the operating system (Windows XP Pro + maybe another OS in dual boot) and the system service programs, such as Firewall, Anti-Virus, drivers and all the stuff that is started on boot-up, to increase the boot speed.

The Data for programs, games and other stuff would remain on my two samsung spin points 160 GB hard drives.
Thus I need at least 3 SATA ports which are not RAID.

What do you guys think about SATA drives for DVD and DVD-burning?

Thanks a lot again!
Your input is really great!


edit:
I think an AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ with 2x 3000 Mhz sounds good, as CPU cooler I consider a Zalman CNPS9500ALED

edit #2:
At a different place I could get the same CPU as box version for the same price as the tray version in another store.
Guess I'll rather go with the box version, as the fan included in that package should be sufficient, as I'm not going to overclock the CPU.

Motherboards: I have three options:
Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
Asus Crosshair
Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
I guess I'll rather go with the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe which is more expensive than the M2N-SLI Deluxe but cheaper than the Crosshair and has the same features as the Crosshair plus two more USB ports.

You of course can use a single device with chipsets that have a raid support too - that's just an option to use if you want to...


Well not only the boot speed but also the startup of all programms on the SSD too...
Unfortunately those SSD are expensive like hell but I'm also looking forward to get one of those with my next upgrade... :P


Today they're a good option - you'll also save you one big IDE-cable this way...


I wouldn't take a Zalman until you're kind of a modder who likes to show his PC's inside to everyone. The reason is that Zalman nowadays just has good looking coolers but things like noise, cooling efficency and price got worse and worse since heatpipes got standard for CPU coolers. I'd recommend a Xigmatek HDT-RS1283 if you want a good cooler. There of course are some which are a bit better but you really have a nice price performance ratio here...


Well this can happen sometimes. The boxed cooler of course is sufficent but not very quiet so if noise is important to you it's better to get a better cooler...


In fact none of them is a good option...
The reason is you should go for an AM2+ mainboard and not just an old AM2. Those AM2+ boards also can take AM2 processors and feature some technical updates for current AM2+ cpus and those to come so it would be stupid to buy an old AM2 board. My recommendation would be an Asus M3A78 Pro or M3N78 Pro where I would prefer the "A" version with an AMD/ATI chipset. The M3N78 Pro is nice too though as it doesn't lack things like a firewire port and has some more USB ports on the back. The M3A78 Pro has a better layout (that ATX power supply is placed quite stupid on the "N" version), things like PS2 connectors for mouse and keyboard and you can use tools like AMD Overdrive with it - I actually bought one M3A78 Pro for my Phenom and I'm totally satisfied. Well - Firewire just as some more USB ports on the backplate would have been nice but that's not too bad. If you want some pictures (and info which water cooling fits :P ) have a look here where I also uploaded some pics:
http://www.forumdeluxx.de/forum/showthread.php?t=517121

Enjoy your meal
Toast

No I did not say that, I said in these particular game tests the GPU clearly bottlenecks the whole outcome making it impossible to see a difference between quad core and dual core setups.



You've posted the links, not me. Anyways, Call of Duty 4 is DirectX 9, optimized to scale well.. it may look incredible and run/play great, but it's not a state-of-the-art game as in demanding the maximum of a system. It was designed around a high end single core system actually.



This is downright false, it has increased hugely.



I'm not going to waste time here proving anything, as you clearly do not even believe what was wrong with my system. I first thought my 350Watt had simply died on me and I even tried a new and different 350Watt psu.

Also, I've tried a 500Watt before buying a 750Watt.. the rather new 500Watt actually also failed when I installed my second 3D card. You can't tell me this has to do with 12V or cables as these two new power supplies where brand new, had the latest things on it and where of the same brand with the same features except higher Watt on one of them, obviously 500Watt just wasn't enough for the system to run.. as was 350Watt when I installed my new 3D card.

This thread is not about my past problems though, so lets keep it clean.



Which is exactly why I do not believe you at all. I was talking about my own experience here, first hand facts, not some bullshit on a site claiming performance figures like you did.

Also, I've just tried deactivating cores in several games, and low and behold it did NOT INCREASE PERFORMANCE as in these tests, in fact the decreased. Explain that to me...



I'm well aware of this, yes. But it doesn't matter as it's a relative issue. Power supplies in the past tagged 350Watt probably didn't output exactly 350Watt either.

In fact, power supplies nowadays get more and more efficient, losing less energy by heat. So I would have expected that the 500Watt supply I used would run fine with 2 3D cards. It didn't and it wasn't a budget supply at all.



Vista 64bit runs 32bit applications fine, it however can not handle x86 drivers. Rumor has it Microsoft will change this in the near future though as they want to push the 64bit platform more,

Cheers

use linux!

here we go...

Use dual boot xp vista and ubuntu!

make use of your cores and run one os on each of them with some virtualization technology. :p

Well I slowly begin to lose your train of thought on all this. First you come up with Crysis as good example for quad core support which is probably the very most GPU limited game out there and now you "moan" about GPU limitations. It actually proves my point of quad cores currently not making too much sense just for gaming and in this special case for the dual core + stronger GPU being the better solution...


Well the page must malfunction with your browser then because the only thing I can think of now is that the link to Assasins Creed doesn't work correctly for you because CoD 4 is directly beneath it. If you're just arguing about that - well I can't help they put multiple benches on one page below each other but it should be clear which benches I pointed out...


Well to prove you wrong:

This is form my old Asus A8N-SLI Premium mainboard which now is over three years old and from the time when SLI showed up. So you see the official recommendation not only is 500 watt and more but they also mention the 12V rail (I think I always wrote trail until now - that was wrong). Now when looking at the consumption of two 6800 Ultra that's nearly as much as a single 4870 drains. Still the recommendation of a new mainboard just says 600 watt for a fully equipped system (I hope you trust me without an image quote) although the consumption has pretty much doubled and although there nowadays also are two GPUs on one PCB. So you see there's not much about those vendor recommendations...


Well as you see now even the vendors told about the 12V rail and you still didn't say which power supply you used back then...


Well I don't know what you're talking about now so I can't explain anything. Deactivating cores which are used of course give you a lower performance. If you're mentioning that in one or two of the benches the "single cored" CPU gets a bit higher results (although only in those tests without AA afaik) that's indeed an interesting result. There was quite a discussion about this but it most certainly is about what happens when you deactivate cores on a quad (remember there's cache to split up for all the cores) and hitting a situation where this will do you good...

But if you are sceptical about those test I can link you others if you want. I'd also like to see those 40-60% gains you were talking of proven for a normal gaming setting...


Well apart from the fact that the efficency has rather little influence on what a power supply can provide what I meant with this is that their for example is a "500 watt" power supply from LC Power where those "500 watt" - well they are no lie but the way they came to this number doesn't work in reality. That's also the reason why the guys at planet3dnow (at least I think it was there) don't really like those PSUs anymore because they ran tests for years and yet again they prove that this PSU literally "explodes" when delivering 400 watts. That's what I meant with this - vendors not only trick with the rails but also are a bit generous with their wattage specs - at last for some of those cheap PSUs...


You mean they want to make the 64bit Vista support 32bit drivers too? That would be quite nice...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

haha, that reminds me of the power supply i put in my friends system. I built him a computer, and he liked glowy things so on newegg i found a "550 watt" psu..... that glowed and had like huge led lit fans in it. I figured, hey, cool looking and had good cooling potential. probably about 2 months later he heard a pop, smelled smoke, and couldnt get anything to work, so we got newegg to give us a different psu, and he tore the fans out of the old one just to put in his pc. luckily no hardware was damaged, and it was one of the few times i didnt read the reviews before i purchased a part (was under the impression that 550 watts was 550 watts) if i had read the reviews, everyone (without exception) had it go within either 2weeks 3 months or 6months. It was odd because at that time i had redone my computer which has a dual core processor, two nvidia 8500's in it 1 harddrive and 3 dvd burners in it and it was running off my old 360watt psu that was in the previous incarnation of my computer. Ran like a gem for 6 months until my friends psu broke and we both got new psu's together. Probably still would have worked for a while longer, so it really goes to show that sometimes numbers can like, and a low watt good psu can sometimes rip a high watt cpu with low quality in half.