The P4 benefits from large amounts of L2, or the presence of L3 cache because of the very small L1 cache, and the need to avoid branch misses. If the BPU on the P4 misses and the data isn't in cache, the penalty to clear and repopulate the very deep pipelines is pretty big.
Um, just check the benchmarks. The AMD 62 X2 3800+ is the better for gaming. (I assumed you meant the X2 since the pentium you speced is dual core). However, if you are wanting as gaming machine, you can get a much faster single core proc for a lot less money. IMHO, by the time enough software is capable to take advantage of multiple cores to make it worthwhile you could buy a dual (or quad) core processor for a lot less than now.CoNnOr36 wrote:
How does the Pentium D 940 (2*3.2 GHZ) compare with the 3800+ in BF2? If 3800+ is faster, will the DDR2 ram make up the difference?
And, DDR2 memory has a higher latency than regular DDR. There is not much benefit at this time until the DDR2 memory speed starts increasing.
Oh, and for Conroe vs. AMD FX-62 take a look at this benchmark. Conroe does take the advntage in most of the benchmarks, and some by a good margin. But, those are all in the game FEAR. In Far Cry the AMD does better, but not by as wide of a margin. I'm still on the fence on this one.
Last edited by Psycho (2006-06-23 14:50:12)