CPU Performance

[Gimmydelf]

<p>I have a Pentium 4, 3GH. I have been considering upgrading to an E8500 3.17gh. My take from reading posts in this forum is that my only increase in performance will be the .17 since EQ2 only uses one core.  Am I correct???</p>

[orthanc]

<p>the core 2 family is faster per mhz than the pentium 4's are</p>

[TSR-JamesM]

<p>EQ2 fully supports multi-core processing. I am not talking about hardware to buy (yer on yer own, sorry) but we will use both or all 4 of your cores.</p>

[Trilarian-2]

<p><cite>TSR-JamesM wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>EQ2 fully supports multi-core processing. I am not talking about hardware to buy (yer on yer own, sorry) but we will use both or all 4 of your cores.</p></blockquote><p>While that statement is true, it is very misleading... <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Though EQ2 will try to put parts of the load across cores, the biggest loads are not threaded by themselves.  I have a quad core and usually see this while grouping:</p><p>Core0 - 100%</p><p>Core1 - 10%</p><p>Core2 - 0%</p><p>Core3 - 0%</p><p>I do run multiple clients sometimes, so the quad comes in handy for that situation.  I would suggest going with the highest MHz speed of the best architecture you can buy within your price range.  The newer architectures perform better than the older at same frequencies.  Here is one example from the review <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=1" target="_blank">here</a>.  It is one example, so not a holy grail of test, just ment to show you that better FPS were achieved at lower frequencies just by using a newer architecture CPU.</p><p><img src="http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/core2duolaunch_07130680720/12587.png" width="500" height="500" /></p>