Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtosDracon /forum/post/18196701
Oh yeah, I in no way meant to guarantee a 4 core system by purchasing a phenom II x2. I will say that the more mature the processors and manufacturing process gets, the more likely you are to get a processor that can unlock all 4 cores, it is obviously never guaranteed.
Before recommending a true quad core though, do the emulators have good SMP or multi-core support? cause if they don't then a faster dual core could actually make for a faster system.
It's not the SMP support in the emulator that's important to me it's that my
HTPC has enough power, and enough available threads, to handle whatever I am doing on it. My machine does all the HDTV recording from 7MC and additionally process the recorded video in the background using either TMPGEnc and/or dvrmstoolbox. If I happen to be playing a game while a show comes on to record (or when a show ends to transcode) I need to make sure there's enough computing power to go around and not have whatever I was recording skip out on me because I was getting in a fix of MegamanX4 in ePSX. Plus my machine is used to serve all the household music so when the woman of the house decides she wants to reshuffle her Ipod from her computer while I'm doing any/all of the above I need to make sure mine doesnt low down because of it feeding all that data across the network.
I'd only recommend dual core if this machine were to be for strictly gaming or strictly HTPC...quad core is NOT that much more expensive anymore (at least with AMD) and offers a ton of benefit for a multipurposed machine such as mine.
Running my 550 stock is NOT enough if everything happens at the same time while I am gaming. 3 cores seems to be enough to get me by. I'm going to jump on a 6 core processor as soon as they become available (assuming they come in under $350 and are at a reasonably high clock speed of 3.0ghz or faster).
