Two Core CPUs- Good or Bad for home users?

[Perham]

i wanted to know ur ideas.

 

[Apokalipse]

possibly bad because of cost, but otherwise, I can't see anything wrong with them.

 

[Trifid]

depends what you are doing with it. Good if you have 2 high demand applications running at the same time, and want great gaming possibilities. Bad if you just use your PC to check your mail etc.

 

[mgoldb2]

There nothing bad about have a dual core cpu. It might be a waste of money. You might not come close to using it full potential. In other words it might be much more powerful then you need but nothing bad you going to notice about the performance.

 

[langers]

Surely its only relevant if the applications support dual processors ?

I am not actually sure how many games support 2 procs?

 

[mgoldb2]

Surely its only relevant if the applications support dual processors ?

or you a mutitasker and use multiple applications at the same time like I do.

or here one for the gamers have you ever sundenly started going slow because your firewall or virus scanner starting doing some thing well with dual core the secound core can take care of it and not affect your gaming.

 

[Trifid]

I don't think there is any games that support dual CPU's. The next gen consoles are going to make it the norm. though.

You also need to buy XP Pro to run 2 cores.

 

[SHAWN]

^W2k should support it to.

 

[madmunki]

Dual-Core means the CPU has two internal processors that can run two core threads at once. ANY application can take advantage of this if it supports multi-threading.

Intel Dual-Core Hyper-Threading processors (Pentium 4 Extreme CPUs) can process 4 threads at once.

I say if you have the money and upgrading your system anyways, get the Dual-Core and start watching for Multi-Threading applications. Search for "Multi-Threaded Email Client", etc. and replace your day to day applications for ones that use multi-threading.

Currently the only game that can support multi-threading is Unreal. However there is several games in development that will support multi-threading. Even if the game doesn't support it, you OS will, and will be able to balance some process off on it. speeding up your main thread that your single-threaded game is using.

The new version of Adobe Photoshop, and new versions of email clients, IM messengers, will be multi-threaded, if not already.

 

[madmunki]

Windows XP SP2 uses the Windows 2003 Server kernal to support dual-core.