Forum

Oh please, go away with the “but i multi-task” bullshit. If your running something that uses a significant amount of CPU at the same time as TF2, then its just stupid. I atm have an E2140 overclocked to 3GHz. I also have a Radeon 4850, and i normally leave mumble, IRC and Pidgin open while playing TF2 and im still not CPU limited.

In short, unless you’ve got a £200+ graphics card then your CPU is not a problem.

And Mugabe, Q9450 is OC’d to max is only marginally slower than i7 920 OC’d to max so bassically, once i get it, Ive got a PC thats just as quick for about £400-500 less. ^_^

AND

Pr0 PC != pr0 gamer…

You can’t buy your way to the top. If you ask some of the div1 guys im sure you’ll be very surprised at the systems their running. ;)

my i7 kicks your ass :)

No actually not in tf2 there is actually a drop in performance when using a i7 over the E8 cpus :P

Well… fps drops are the last thing I check or worry about with a max fps 300 I continuously hit ( on max graphs 1680 x 1050 ). Well, i got an gtx 295 though :) O And I oclocked the i7 to 3,0 Ghz ( on air ) with turbo and multithreading enabled…

And I think Windows 7 changes this drop in performance because it’s so good in dividing tasks. You tested this with W7 ?

Very strange btw…

My old E6600 @ 3.2ghz with my old 4870×2 and 3gb gave stable 200fps (300fps is bad for many reasons, since we all know what happens — if you don’t and are happy with it, good for you). I “upgraded” a few months back to the i7 920 too and got it stable at 3.9ghz (also on air), just as with the e6600, it was still rock solid 200 fps. FPS drops is easy to get if you’re not careful in whatever configuration or hardware you are using, source is a _shabby_ engine (hint, do NOT use max_fps over 200).

Now, if you have no idea what is so great with the I7 (if you got it because ‘lael, new process0r must rawk!”, you’re only partly right and pretty wank) I guess you could say it’s a “waste of money” when it comes to gaming. If you actually use a computer for what it was designed for, i.ex. work that put demands on all three parts that actually makes a COMPUTER (cpu, i/o and memory) — that’s just what you get. Comparing any other architecture to the I7 in regards of gaming is clueless.

If you DO game with the I7, for the love of god, turn off HT quickly. It makes things _worse_ (particularly in source-based games for some reason).

I might also add that the task scheduler in Windows 7 is pretty much the same as in Vista, so it’s not any better, nor worse, at “dividing tasks”.

In the end, if you’re about to upgrade to a new “gaming rig” right now, either wait a bit for prices to drop a bit or get the I5 right away. There is _no_ reason in getting an old steaming hot processor at the near end of 2009.

Gryzor’s post

Or don’t wait and buy a Phenom II 955.

Hmmm….

I +1 Gryzors post about 95%

+1 to everything he said regarding i7, -1 about getting i5. The problem is not the CPU itself, its the fact that your not just spending £x on a CPU, you need to get a new Motherboard and probably new RAM too. So the the upgrade isn’t cost £100-150 as with the Core2, but £400 with almost no significant performance increase.

Phenom is pretty shit for a number of reasons. Theres more to how fast a CPU is than its clock speed. PhenomII is AMD only JUST managing to catch up with Core2 and bang on the dot, i7 comes in and kicks it a rather hard kick up the rear. AMD is really in a dior situation as a company, which I’d really hate to see them go down as Intel is already over-pricing their hardware because AMD just can’t compete. If we see Intel take a monopoly, such a thing is very bad.

But anyway, im getting Off-topic here.

tl;dr : i7 isn’t an option because you need to spend silly money making your PC compatible.

Hmmm….

I +1 Gryzors post about 95%

+1 to everything he said regarding i7, -1 about getting i5. The problem is not the CPU itself, its the fact that your not just spending £x on a CPU, you need to get a new Motherboard and probably new RAM too. So the the upgrade isn’t cost £100-150 as with the Core2, but £400 with almost no significant performance increase.

Phenom is pretty shit for a number of reasons. Theres more to how fast a CPU is than its clock speed. PhenomII is AMD only JUST managing to catch up with Core2 and bang on the dot, i7 comes in and kicks it a rather hard kick up the rear. AMD is really in a dior situation as a company, which I’d really hate to see them go down as Intel is already over-pricing their hardware because AMD just can’t compete. If we see Intel take a monopoly, such a thing is very bad.

But anyway, im getting Off-topic here.

tl;dr : i7 isn’t an option because you need to spend silly money making your PC compatible.

More offtopic sorry.
I respectfully disagree, the Phenom sucked, but they made up with the Phenom II.
They’re no match for the i7, but that difference only shows in rendering, video editing etc …
They do however kick the C2Q’s ass, and the have the advantage of being upgradeable whereas S775 is about dead.

You should also consider the fact that i7 is way more expensive than the Phenoms.

He was “getting a new computer”. Shelling out for memory/mobo/cpu for a 775 rig seems really dumb compared to shelling out, say, 150€ more for getting the same items and an I5 rig. Might as well save up a month (in which time the prices should already started to drop) instead of buying an already dead (not to mention powerhungry and hot) platform. It was not a question of buying “just a cpu”.

What you probably do not take into the equation, is the P55 chipsets vastly superior I/O-components regarding SATA, PCI-E, NO MEMORY CONTROLLER (since it’s in the cpu) and other things we all like. Just having ICH10 compared to ICH9 (bet someone is still on ICH8) feels like a win and waiting for ICH11 for SATAv3 is not an option for at least 6+ months.

Recommending a P45/X45 equipped motherboard coupled with a Wolfdale- / Yorkfield- (E7-/E8-/Q8-/Q9-) processor seems a bit off. 2-3 months ago, yes, today — no.

But what do I know, my field of expertise are IBM Unix-systems, not PCs.

PS; What are the problems with multithreading ? I don’t have any problems so I’m curious :D And with above 200fps ? what’s that all about ? never heard about any of it… well I never needed to search for is :)

One of the problem with HT is that you get a lot of parking done by W7 (EDIT: Might have to explain this a bit — parking is when W7 puts a core into “sleep” state, hence it takes no power and is removed from the resource-pool. This is done to save power and resources and CAN NOT BE TURNED OFF (argh). It also seems to be making questionable parking at times, turning off obvious an obvious third HT-shadow as well as a fourth ‘real’ core, which makes no sense), this is unnecessary overhead _WHEN YOU ARE USING SINGLETHREADED APPLICATIONS_ (important note). Since TF2 also only uses ONE THREAD at constant 100% (and a material-thread mucking about around 15-20%ish on most systems), if you actually DO search on the subject, you will see that nearly all games have a pretty hefty fps-drop with HT enabled, whilst threaded applications enjoy a tremendous boost. Source is one of the engines who had the largest boost, from the top of my head it was something like 140 vs. 190fps at high resolution and settings.

Since I’m a gentoo-freak myself, I might also add that disabling HT decreased my compilation-times of the kernel by 1/3. Very odd, but very true. I ran it multiple times just to validate it.

Best case would be able to toggle HT on/off after the CPU has entered awake state (on for video/music, off for gaming/compiling/virtual machines), as it stands now, you can’t toggle HT without completely powering down the processor :

The problem with FPSMAX is the “microstuttering” that people complain about. Setting FPSMAX to 0 or somewhere above 200 gives this problem (i experienced it myself and gave this advice to many people suffering from the same issue — which fixed their griefs) due to [insert technobabble here] (read: I have no idea why).

It just works :)