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Advice on 2 systems needed
Hello everyone,
I own 2 systems.
1.
I3-2100 (2nd gen, 2 cores and 2 HT threads)
4GB DDR3-1333mhz
HD6870
2.
AMD Phenom X4 965 Black Edition (4 cores)
8GB DDR2-800mhz
HD5770
System no.1 has newer technology; faster ram, faster gfx, but a dual core(although hyperthreaded) cpu.
System no.2 is older; slower ram, slower gfx, but has 4 physical cores and 8GB of RAM.
Without a doubt system no.1 is faster in single player games, but whenever I play heavy multiplayer games like mmo's or big online shooters like BF3 I get low fps whatever setting. Low to ultra, the fps might change with 1-5 max. I think this is because of mmo's are more CPU bound and that the i3 just isn't enough for games showing a lot of players.
System no.2 would theoretically have less problems with a lot of players due to the 4 core cpu I reckon?
Since I'm aiming at playing mmo's/multiplayer games, should I put the HD6870 in system no.2 for better results in mmo's?
Will the DDR2 memory at 800mhz be that much slower then the DDR3-1333mhz memory?
Any advice is welcome!
Kon.
Comments
The first system could be better with a processor upgrade. Find out what the best processor is that your motherboard supports. You'll have to check the manufacturer's web page for that. You may also want to upgrade to 8GB of RAM.
The reason your second system performs better in MMOs is not due to increased number of cores. The single-core performanceon the Phenom X4 is likely better than the Core i3. If the first system's motherboard supports a Core i5-3570K, you would be set for a while if you upgraded to it.
You could always try putting the 6870 in system #2 and see if that gives you satisfactory frame rates.
If not then you can also just upgrade from the I 3 to an I 5 that goes in that socket. An I5 2500 would for sure go and would not need any kind of bios update on the motherboard.
I'd rather not spend money on an upgrade, was hoping to mix n match with what I currently have got. I guess upgrading to an i5 will give a lot more performance compared to the amd quad core?
And what about that DDR2 ram? I'm no expert...I read that there isnt much difference in DDR2 and DDR3 speeds when gaming(performance wise). Is that true? Then I could just plug the 6870 in the quad core system I guess....
I'm going to try the 6870 in system2 this evening. Lets hope I dont break anything:P
As to whether or not a game runs better on either system depends on how it's been written. I don't think many MMOs have been written to really take advantage of four cores. Most of them are going to run on one core, even if they are multi threaded. I would not think the AMD system is going to outperform the Intel system, unless the AMD cores are faster than the Intel cores. Though, there are also some optimizations that might be happening on the AMD system that aren't happening on the Intel system.
Why don't you just try it out? You have the two systems, just play the same game on both and see what works better.
**
Scratch that. Put the memory and video card from the Intel system into the AMD system.
**
You could maybe skip the ram, not sure if the faster ram would be a noticeable difference.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The AMD system doenst support the DDR3 ram, so i could only swap the gfx card.
Yeah I know just swapping and testing would answer my question, but since im not an expert im trying to avoid unnecessary tooling around hehe.
You should get better performance out of the AMD proc and the faster gpu. The slower memory probably isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.
However, "better performance" doesn't mean doubling your speeds. Games might be a little less choppy, or maybe you'll go from 30fps to 35fps, something like that.
Your motherboard won't support the faster ram, so it's possible that speed gains from the cpu get eaten up trying to move information around from memory to the cpu to the gpu. Your net gain could be 0 (I don't think so, but this might be the case).
I'm afraid that tooling around is really the only way to know for sure if you're really going to get better performance. :-)
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The difference in performance will vary greatly based on the individual game.
This thread has some interesting reading, particularly in relation to BF3. Pay particular attention to the graphs midway down:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/339281-28-multiplayer-scaling
The i3 is probably faster per core, but a HT core isn't the same as a real core, it's only about 40% as effective. So yeah, it shows up as a quad core, but really it's 2 real cores + 2 slow virtual cores.
In games that can actually use all 4 cores (such as BF3 multiplayer) - the Phenom wins. Combine the fact that a lot of those Phenoms were excellent over clockers is kind of a double whammy.
The problem is that not all games can actually use 4 cores, multiplayer, MMO, or whatever. In fact, the vast majority of games can barely leverage 2 cores, which is why you see the Core i3 performing so much better in a lot of games.
It's going to really depend game to game -- if the game is choking even on low graphics settings; yea, your probably CPU constrained. It doesn't really matter if it's a Multiplayer or MMO game, it just depends on the game itself, and if it can leverage multiple cores or not effectively.
There are a couple of other points: with only 4G of RAM in the Intel system, it's likely that you could be bumping up against your physical RAM limitation, and the computer is being forced to go out to virtual memory. That will result in a massive slowdown of your system; it will be hugely noticeable, and wouldn't matter what CPU or GPU you were using. The only way to really tell if that is happening is to look at your memory usage (Task Manger), or to listen for your hard drive chugging away like it's on crack.
The difference between DDR2 and DDR3 - yeah, minimal in real-world situations. It would pretty much amount to a rounding error in terms of FPS.
The 6870 is a good deal faster than a 5770, but even a 5770 should play most every game with at least moderate graphics settings. You won't MAX MAX out everything with either video card, but both should be playable in nearly every game with some settings tweaks.