What's the point of a Fast CPU???

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ShockG

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With everybody buying X2 4200, 4400+ etc Intel Core2 Duo and other zippy CPU's? Does anybody appreciate the speed difference it makes in everyday computing?

Was just thinking that I've had a number of super overclocked ubber whatnot CPU's, but they spend most of the time not using half that power.
I'm typing this right now on a Duron 800MHz with 512MB of RAM and an on-board SiS XerminatorII VGA adapter (on-board). I'm listening to MP3's and have Paint Shop Pro open as well. Everything works fine and I'm using less than I do when I have the other rig on idle... :(
As such I don't think I'll ever buy any high end CPU, RAM, Motherboard or graphics card ever again.

I will waste no more money on this stuff... The promise of 70fps in Doom3 compared to 50fps is not even worth R10!
 
man...I have: MSN Messenger, bitcommet, winamp, word, photoshop CS2, firefox and visual studio open it totaly sux on a 2500+ i need dual core!!
 
there is a major difference when it comes to running 5 excel spreadsheets, all reading live info from a server, whilst in the background running an entire intranet site, encoding 5fm from a radio card to windows media encoder and broadcasting that over the LAN, and in the meantime trying to copy a dvd. sure you can do that all on a p3 800mhz pc as long as you have plenty ram, however excel and Access tend to work much faster with a faster cpu, things that use to take hours to calculate now take minutes,

i also think a major difference is because it can handle things faster, it tends to make less "mistakes" as each task is completed much faster so less "concurrent tasks" running that may mess up if things gets duplicated which in turn result in less reboots and fewer times that you need to repeat things over and over cause your program froze and you lost your work.

but ja for a office pc, as long as the windows installation is clean (no crap running in background) anything from 'n pentium 2 upwards will do the trick if you can have 512mb ram in it :)
 
ATI said:
man...I have: MSN Messenger, bitcommet, winamp, word, photoshop CS2, firefox and visual studio open it totaly sux on a 2500+ i need dual core!!
Click to expand...

no, you need RAM. if its still slow, you propably have some crappy adware or other useless processes running in background. have a look at the task manager at the cpu usage, its propably like 5% idle most of the time, meaning its not the CPU making it slow....
 
hmmm shock g i want to see you get 50 fps with that rig

i want to see you open a 20 meg file with paint shop pro on that rig

its like saying you dont see the point of a 1300 vs a 2.0L engine

do you like waiting for things to process?

i love the fact that my cpu runs fast and does everything in a second

makes my artwork life so much easier

i can scan a picture at 600 dpi a4 and dont have to go make coffee while when i open it in corel draw


lets get into games

slow cpu means slow performance even if you have a good vga card

a cpu is the driving force behind your computer and having a fast one means everyday things happen that much faster, which in turn will save companies money
 
killadoob said:
hmmm...
Click to expand...

it basically comes to my point also. its not a matter of can it do anything the slower one cant do, it just takes a whole lot less time. time is money. also older computers give more problems, meaning you have to reboot every day like 3 times and the reboot takes like 20 minutes because you first struggle to get it working again before you decide to reboot. so thats an hour every day wasted on your "old" computer
 
Typical for the topic to get completely skewed.
What he means is - How often do you use your CPU 100%, think of it percentage wize, 20%, 30%??? Go look in you task manager performance tab right now and tell me.
Next issue: When you get to a certain level of performance that a 3500 has, what more are you paying for, for the game to suddenly speed up while you're playing it just because you have a dual core, lol I don't think so. Paying rediculous amounts of money for a 7950GT2 or whatever ridiculous name they call it, is absolute BS..... what for, less jagged edges in your game when they already have as little is as possible?
Been there done that, boring.
Edit: Want a performance increase, go buy some RAM.
 
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i am not justifying buying moerse vga cards, i also think its crazy what some people pay for them. the cpu you wont really ever see okay there its now fully used 100% for 5 minutes. its not about pushing it to the limit all the time, its when you click "excel" excel opens within the blink of an eye, it doesnt first think "mmmmmm should i open it?"
 
ShockG said:
With everybody buying X2 4200, 4400+ etc Intel Core2 Duo and other zippy CPU's? Does anybody appreciate the speed difference it makes in everyday computing?

Was just thinking that I've had a number of super overclocked ubber whatnot CPU's, but they spend most of the time not using half that power.
I'm typing this right now on a Duron 800MHz with 512MB of RAM and an on-board SiS XerminatorII VGA adapter (on-board). I'm listening to MP3's and have Paint Shop Pro open as well. Everything works fine and I'm using less than I do when I have the other rig on idle... :(
As such I don't think I'll ever buy any high end CPU, RAM, Motherboard or graphics card ever again.

I will waste no more money on this stuff... The promise of 70fps in Doom3 compared to 50fps is not even worth R10!
Click to expand...
It depends on what you do with the machine. If what you have suits your needs then there's little need to upgrade but people are usually sold on the idea that they need to. Software developers also exasperate the problem by raising the bar on the minimum requirements.

On the other end there are the high end users and gamers that benefit greatly with having a high end machine.
 
my cpu is always near 100%

from playing computer games

also i have noticed a big improvement in my battlefield 2 game since getting a dual core

i think because one core handles only bf 2 and not all the other windows kuk
thats left to the second core i think :)

7950 doesnt make the edges less jaggered man
you can high res with 8 aa 16 AF

looks amazing

if i had the money i would so buy myself a really super fast pc :)

speeddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

i used to hate waiting for stuff to open, now nothing waits cept corel draw but thats like 3 seconds
 
killadoob said:
i used to hate waiting for stuff to open, now nothing waits cept corel draw but thats like 3 seconds
Click to expand...
I could force myself to at least respect your choice in cpu's :p but Corel Draw? :eek:
 
Typical for the topic to get completely skewed.
What he means is - How often do you use your CPU 100%, think of it percentage wize, 20%, 30%??? Go look in you task manager performance tab right now and tell me.
Next issue: When you get to a certain level of performance that a 3500 has, what more are you paying for, for the game to suddenly speed up while you're playing it just because you have a dual core, lol I don't think so. Paying rediculous amounts of money for a 7950GT2 or whatever rediculous name they call it, is absolute BS..... what for, less jagged edges in your game when they already have as little is as possible?
Been there done that, boring.
Edit: Want a performance increase, go buy some RAM.
Click to expand...

Thank you, You get what I was getting at exactly.

I'm not saying I'll be playing FarCry on this machine (I have another rig for that) but what I'm saying is, for all intents and purposes I can't really tell the difference to the point where I feel compelled to run out right now and buy super fast CPU, hard drives etc...

I'm saying for the normal home user who watches DVD's/ plays the odd game or so, why do you actaully need those fast CPU's. I mean even an Athlon64 3000+ is fast enough with plenty of ram.

I can't believe people are defending spending large sums of money on what is essentially a pipe dream. "Do more in less time"- Yeah Right! Do what exactly?
Encode Movies? - I don't do this everyday, heck once a month more like it... And the rest of the time I'm watching DVD's/music/ forums etc... That hardly needs a dual core CPU and a 500GB video card. :/
 
Often times you get a ****ty program that uses 100% of the process and your whole computer comes to a halt. Now with a dual core it doesn't cause the program uses 100% of one core. Sometimes the crappy program makes the computer so slow that it's hard top shut down the process, there is none of that with a dual core.

You also get people who render things and use their computer for other more intensive purposes, without a powerful cpu this would take ages. So it's not about fully utilizing your cpu for as long as you can, but has more to do with how long it takes to perform a certain task. ;)
 
bwana v.18 said:
It depends on what you do with the machine.
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I agree totaly. Especially if you use it for video editing.

Compressing a 720x540 video to the latest H264 codec runs at 1 or 2 fps on my 3500+ cpu. Doing this in realtime would require a much faster cpu than currently available commercialy. That or some special video hardware.

Also, some ppl use their computers for complex simulations. Again, even a super computer is sometimes not enough.
 
Nope, still not getting it.
In certain cases it is warranted, but in how many cases, 10%, 20%?
Every Tom **** and Harry buying a super(expensive)computer is ridiculous, in a way it is understandable the way they advertise things nowadays.Take Telkom 4Mbit DSL....
4Mbit local is pretty certain, but International-yeh right! You're better off with 512, more value for money, I spk from experience.
 
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Yeah some are talking about special cases, I', talking average use for average person who isn't decoding Human DNA or some other stuff.

And even for the gamers.
How does this make sense? You buy a high end GFX card so you can play 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF, then spend R8K on a CPU. But at that res you're GPU bound anyway and a guy with an Athlon64 3000+ gets the same frame-rates. So what again are you going to do with all that power except run up the electricity bill and heat up the planet?

Bleh no matter how you look at, me I'm never buying the marketing. Its all meaningless dribble . nVidia's Power of 3 campaign "SLI, HDR and SM3.0" What the hell does that mean?? :(
 
Beta said:
Nope, still not getting it.
In certain cases it is warranted, but in how many cases, 10%, 20%?
Every Tom **** and Harry buying a super(expensive)computer is rediculous, in a way it is understandable the way they advertise things nowadays.Take Telkom 4Mbit DSL....
4Mbit local is pretty certain, but International-yeh right! You're better off with 512, more value for money, I spk from experience.
Click to expand...
The salient point is not how often you want to stall your computer but do you want it stalling at all. Even if you only have the occasional need to manipulate a massive image you still need to be able to do it and that in itself will justify the cost.

Is your time worth money? Buy for your needs - now and tomorrow.

And as for the Telkom bump - I figure 8 times the speed is worth the extra r150 - we get sent large files on a regular basis and the speeds we get them from overseas is close to 4mbit.
 
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