Hardcore hardware

Over the last eighteen months the decision to upgrade your system CPU has been a no-brainer – if you had anything over 2.5GHz or so, you’d be better off booking a trip to Bali rather than buying a new processor. You can thank the silicon gremlins that struck both Intel and AMD for this – CPU frequency growth slowed to a grinding halt over this period.

Newer, faster CPUs continued to be released, but the frequency increases were incremental at best, unnoticeable at worst. So there was simply no need to upgrade if you had anything half-decent.

However, things got a little more complicated when Intel and AMD both introduced new Socket designs. Socket 939 was introduced for the Athlon 64, while LGA 775 made for a whole new platform for Intel users. Therefore, if you’re going to upgrade with an eye on future upgrades, it’s wise to go for a motherboard/ CPU combination that uses one of these newer Socket designs. It’s still possible to stick with the older sockets (Socket 754 for AMD, Socket 478 for Intel), but you’ll fi nd that your future CPU options will be severely limited. And if you have a CPU in the range of 3GHz or so, it’s still not worth upgrading just yet. Even if you’re prepared to fork out for the fastest chips in both Intel’s and AMD’s product catalogues, which will set you back a pretty penny to say the least, you’re only going to notice a 30 percent speed increase at best – and this will only occur under the most extreme, CPU-bottlenecked circumstances. The vast majority of today’s games all run very well on a 3GHz chip, with performance limitations usually being tied to the video subsystem rather than the processor.

However, things are about to get a little confusing with the imminent introduction of dual-core CPUs from both of the major chip makers. Bear in mind that these chips will give no noticeable performance improvement while playing games. It’s only when running multithreaded software, or when multi-tasking, that these dual-cores will show their true, dazzling potential. Due to the fact that the individual cores in the initial batch of dual-core chips will run at a lower frequency than the single-core chips we have today, they’ll usually be slower at running your games.

Therefore gamers are advised to hold off on making the switch to dual-core CPUs until the frequency of the cores within these doubleheaded beasts equal that of our single-cored CPUs. The introduction of games that make the most of multi-threading will bring forth a massive performance increase, but these titles aren’t due anytime soon. In fact, we can’t even think of a single game in development that has been slated as taking advantage of multi-threading.

If you do feel the urge to upgrade to a platform that will be able to host these dualcore chips, AMD has a massive advantage over Intel. This is because existing Socket 939 motherboards should be able to run these chips with a mere BIOS fl ash, while Intel users will need an entirely new chipset. Once again it appears that AMD has developed a roadmap that keeps its punters happy, with a simple and cheap upgrade path, while Intel has yet again wiped the slate and introduced an entirely new platform.

This fact alone makes the decision about which CPU to upgrade to rather simple. Combine this with the Athlon 64’s ability to run games more speedily than the Pentium 4, and it’s pretty easy to see why we recommend going AMD for your future upgrade.

But until these new chips arrive, we’re stuck with what’s on the market now. Let’s take a look at how the crop of today’s existing CPUs stack up against each other.