Ok time for an upgrade in computer

[Harkoliar]

I have a decent working "close to a 5 year old " computer.
ITs about time for an upgrade or actually buying a new spanking computer.

I just have a quick question to you guys who are familiar with quadcore technology. I am planning to buy Phenom AMD quadcore. I am wondering would WinVista support or fully utilize all 4 cores? It would be a great waste if it didnt.

edit: also, would it be a 32 or 64bit?

[Firestormalpha]

I recall hearing that it was designed for that very purpose, but I haven't looked into it recently so I could have that mixed up.

[Hivetyrant]

Why AMD?
They certainly were the dark horse of the CPU market for a while, but Intel's chips can't be beaten in bang for buck
In fact the bottom of the range Q6600 beats the three current Phenom chips in most benchmarks, plus the Motherboards available for Intel chips are generally better atm.

I'll allways be an AMD/ATI fan, but my current Intel/NvIdia system can't be beat by them!

[SecretMaster]

AMD indeed is faring rather poorly right now. At least on the CPU front. GPU-wise I think they are doing just fine. However if you are going to go with quad-cores, I'd suggest wait a month or so until Intel releases their 45nm quadcores.

If you want a good starting guide, I always refer people to this.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14225

[Harkoliar]

so is quadcore a 64 bit platform or 32?

[Harkoliar]

Originally Posted by Hivetyrant Why AMD? They certainly were the dark horse of the CPU market for a while, but Intel's chips can't be beaten in bang for buck In fact the bottom of the range Q6600 beats the three current Phenom chips in most benchmarks, plus the Motherboards available for Intel chips are generally better atm. I'll allways be an AMD/ATI fan, but my current Intel/NvIdia system can't be beat by them!

im leaning in terms of price at this time. Of course I did hear something about AMD releasing a better version end of the year. Im wondering if I can wait that long. Lol. I said Ill buy a new computer last year with dual core

[SecretMaster]

All CPU's at this point are designed for 64-bit computing. I'd personally recommend going with a 64-bit OS simply because it alleviates the problem of having a maximum of 4GB system RAM. (I'd recommend building your new rig with 4GB since memory is dirt cheap at this point).

As for the new AMD's... well there certainly are no quad-offerings at their price yes. But if you are going to go AMD, wait for the B3 Quad revisions. The newly released quads by AMD have some sort of TLB erratum bug, its been way overhyped but basically AMD BIOS patched all the quads and it severly hampers performance. So hold on the trigger of buying AMD until they release the new quads which are B3 Revised, meaning they aren't affected by the bug and you won't have to deal with the performance hit.

Also keep in mind that so far I've heard that the chipset/motherboard offerings for the new Phenom processors aren't the greatest, but again better offerings are expected in the near future.

And just how long can hold off on buying the system, just out of curiousity?

[Harkoliar]

from what i have been researching, that bios fix patch will hamper the performance by 10% which si quite significant. I believe I will have to wait for the next batch hopefully will come late this year. A couple more months? I suppose for better stability ( and I can save )

But if I should go for 64bit, would it affect playing old games and softwares?

[SecretMaster]

Well if you can wait a few months I think that would be the most optimal option. If memory serves, I believe the time frame for the newly revised B3 chips is around May sometime. But to be honest I don't know how that information will hold; AMD seems to be putting out nothing but bad news about delays on their CPU front nowadays

Although recent rumors suggest their 45nm parts will come out in 3rd Quarter of this year, so around July-September. However I'm taking these rumors with a grain of a salt, but only time will tell.

Certain softwares are affected with 64-bit. I honestly can't tell you which ones, you'd have to do some searching to see which have drivers and are compatible. But I'd suspec that if it is old software, it probably wouldn't run.

As for games, there have been issues with some games in 64 bit. And I'd venture to say the older the game the more problems there would be, but I don't know. I do know however that older games don't even run under Vista period. For instance I cannot get HoMMIII to run on this laptop, which has Vista.

[Harkoliar]

i suppose i will have to hunker down again and wait for the end of the year. I hope it better be worth it