next pc to maximize blitz max :)
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/next pc to maximize blitz max :)
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| Hopefully in the near future and then again perhaps not I plan to replace my very much aging 1GHZ AMD athlon and was wondering what others would suggest as a good power system, I like the AMD and was wondering if the new AMD X2 (dual core processor) would offer a significant advantage over just a good single core AMD or if one has suggestions on something better then AMD 64 please let me know what you feel would be a good system to think about. Probably should have put this in general discussion but one of the main points of me getting a better system is to take advantage of the cool capabilities of BMAX moving forward. Thanks, |
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| what is your budget? |
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| dual core is nice, but not magic either: Unless the application/game you are running is multi-threaded, it will still be limited to the speed of a single core. A CPU with dual 2.5 GHz cores will only give you 2.5 GHz of power to a single-threaded application (like blitzmax). Now, meanwhile the other core can be used to run your OS, virus scanner, and resident stuff in the background so the system in question will be slightly faster than a single core 2.5 GHz system, but unless the program you are running is multithreaded itself, the actual performance you'll be seeing won't even be close to the combined speed of both cores. They are still very nice systems, but keep that bit of info in the back of your mind -- depending on what kind of apps you're running, a single core 3.2 GHz system may run quite a bit faster for you than a dual core 2.5 GHz. (Of course the appearance of dual core CPU's will lead to more and more multithreaded programs being created created, so in time this may change... but at the moment the vast majority of programs is single threaded, including anything churned out by Blitz, blitzplus, blitz3d and blitzmax. (Although there is an unofficial multithreading module out for blitzxmax, windows only) |
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| Honestly, it's hard to get a bad system right now unless you're getting one of those low-end Dell's with integrated motherboard graphics (general speed of processing is great, graphics are not so great). They're all very similar in performance. |
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| What xlsior said. A dual core/CPU/HT system is not currently going to give you a performance boost in BlitzMAX, and I wager in Windows application at all for as long as it's using the same horrible half-assed threading model it's been using since the dawn of time, and which was a bad idea, even then. It'll be interesting to see if Longhorn provides a better threading / process model. |
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| Thanks all for your replys ... as far as budget looking probably $2500 range |
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| Wow, I didn't think anyone paid $2500 for a PC any more :) You can get a 3GHz PC with a gigabyte of RAM and a Radeon 9800 for $1000 or so. You could pay a few hundred extra and go with a super-high end card just to future proof yourself (though with over 50% of all new PCs being notebooks, it's tough to bank on your target audience having video cards like that). You could jump to 2GB of RAM. But I'm having a hard time figuring out how to spend $2500 unless you're willing to pay $1000+ just for a brand new processor that's 10% faster or an Apple cinematic display :) |
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