FathomsDown wrote:
Psycho wrote:
It won't do anything for your load times since BF2 is not dual processor/dual core aware.
BF2 isn't but it will fun faster as the other Windows/AV/etc processes will run on the other core. More cores = more timeslices even for single threaded apps.
Saying that a single Athlon would probably be faster than dual Opertons for gaming as they are not optimised for graphics processing (they are grunt processors so lack the registers that the Athlon and Athlon FX have).
The first statement is true, but has very little real world use. I can alt+tab out and back into BF2 faster now with a dual core. As for Opterons not being good graphics chips you're just dead wrong. Please read on...
Faster Single core processors are the way to go for BF2 though. I currently have an opteron 165 clocked just shy of 2.8Ghz and when I'm setting "affinity" or only using 1 processor it's noticably slower than my last chip, an Opteron 146 clocked to 2.85 (2.9 for a while)Ghz. Before I starting having these "connection" issues and I was using both cores it seemed as fast as the 146.
With the 146 there was NEVER a person that loaded a new map faster than I did. There was 1 time when someone loaded about the same time as me, but that only happened once.
With my 165 I've had serious "connection to server lost" issues and finally realized the only to avoid them is to set my BF2 to only use 1 processor. Once I started doing this I've noticed that I start new maps behind a small handful of people on 50 to 64 player maps. I miss knowing I would be #1.
In both setups I run a single 7200rpm seagate drive so my advantage does not come from a raptor 10k rpm drive.
I'm not trying to be a PITA, I'm just giving my real world experience for those debating between an A64, X2, opteron single or dual core. Sorry to hijack the thread...
OP, maximum PC magazine built a DUAL EVERYTHING system several months back. It had 2 dual core processors with 2 7800GTX cards in SLI. It was a great idea, but looked like c$#) and I was not impressed.
