Am I doubling my performance? AMD 9750 to AMD FX-4100

[bigheaded]

Hi there,

So let me start off by saying I'm an intermediate when it comes to computer hardware knoweldge so I'm not always 100% confident in my understandings with these matters.

With that out of the way, my question. I'm looking to upgrade my gaming rig at a minimal cost and after picking up a second ATI 5770 HD GPU a few months ago, it's time for a Mobo/CPU upgrade because I feel my current Mobo/CPU is bottlenecking my performance.

Anyway, going solely based on the scores provided in the benchmarking chart availalbe on this site, am I correct in saying, I am affectively doubeling my CPU speeds by upgrading to the AMD FX-6100 (5720) from AMD 9750 (2792)?

[David (PassMark)]

You'd be going from a 4 core CPU to a 6 core CPU.

If you were planning a game that could max out 6 cores, and not be bottle necked by the video card, the RAM, the hard disk or anything else, then maybe you would see double the performance.

However pretty much no game on the market scales linearly as the core count is increased. In fact in many games you might find 3 or 4 of your cores effectively idle. So you won't be able to max out the six cores.

So you should see improved performance, but not dramatically improved.

[bigheaded]

IYO - Intel or AMD?

I've always used AMD because they've been cost effective, but I feel that they've been slipping behind Intel more and more over the last few year and even much more so after reading the Bulldozer reviews.

[David (PassMark)]

If you aren't concerned about the cost then Intel at the moment. Intel is also better in single threaded performance & power usage (watts).
If value for money is the major issue, then AMD has a slight lead depending on the application. But you also need to check motherboard prices and if you are really concerned about value, factor in the electricity usage if you are a heavy user.

[MarkDLeach]

How about Hyper Threading? Do games see those as cores? If so does it hurt to have it enabled for games that might only be able to use two threads?

[David (PassMark)]

Yes, all applications see hyperthreading as cores.

But the operating system is smarter and knows the different between a real core and a HT core.

Quote from Microsoft's "Windows Platform Design Notes - Windows Support for Hyper-Threading Technology" document.

"As a result of the HT processor identification support, the following HT-aware features are included in Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 family.
• HT-aware thread scheduling
• Aggressive HALT of processors in the idle loop
• Using the YIELD instructions to avoid spinlock contention
......
To take advantage of this performance opportunity, the scheduler in the Windows Server 2003 family and Windows XP has been modified to identify HT processors and to favor dispatching threads onto inactive physical processors wherever possible."

So in summary, there should be no need to turn off HyperThreading in games or any other application whose thread usage doesn't exceed the number of physical cores (or CPUs) available.