Which is better?

[Visvalor]

Hey guys, building up a computer to play Oblivion in

 

I've got an nVidia GTS250 which is plenty to run Oblivion, but I'm confused as to which PC to put the card in.

 

On the one hand I have an nVidia XFX 8200 motherboard, with a quad core phenom running at 2.4ghz

 

On the other hand I have a generic socket 775 board with a Pentium 4 3.8ghz processor in it.

 

Now if I'm to understand this correctly, Oblivion is all about clock speed vs multi-cores as it can't make use of multiple cores as well as most other programs.

 

So do I go with the p4 3.8 or the Phenom X4 2.4?

 

Thanks!

[Striker879]

I would tend towards the P4 except for one consideration. When you play games do you disable all background processes (anti-virus etc). If you don't the quad core with one or two cores dedicated to Oblivion might be better than raw speed (the unused cores can keep Vista or Win 7 happy in the background).

[Visvalor]

I would tend towards the P4 except for one consideration. When you play games do you disable all background processes (anti-virus etc). If you don't the quad core with one or two cores dedicated to Oblivion might be better than raw speed (the unused cores can keep Vista or Win 7 happy in the background).

 

 

Actually don't even have an anti-virus or anything else installed. Just a slipstreamed copy of XP and Oblivion with mods and support programs.

 

I'm trying to get the best rig I can within cost to run this game with all these mods and upgrades :P

[Striker879]

I don't think XP will allow you the flexibility to specify cores to processes. I run on a Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz (haven't ever tried it on my 3.2 GHz Northwood) running XP. Using the tweaks suggested in Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide I've enable multi-core support for Havok but I'm not sure how big an effect that has. If you're just cobbling something together from an existing stockpile of parts you could try one and then the other ... not efficient from a time and effort management standpoint but you'd become the definitive source for the answer to that question.

[razorpony]

If you bring up taskmanager in XP you can assign core affinity to different processes. Also, even though the clock speed is lower the phenom might have better overall performance than the aging P4 architecture. I'd google some comparisons over at tomshardware.com.

Another thing to look at is the type and speed of RAM each board can accept.

 

-Razorpony

[chaospearl]

While we're on the subject... is there a way to make the assignments permanent? If I'm doing something in the background while playing Oblivion, I can assign that background process to a specific core, but the moment I close down the process the affinity returns to default. I have to set it again the next time. And it doesn't work well when I try assigning Oblivion to run a specific core (usually for testing purposes) because the game does not like it when I minimize it to bring up TM. Half the time it crashes on me when I try to bring up the window again after minimizing it. And I can't set a core affinity unless the process is running. Am I missing something obvious or is this just the way it is?

[Visvalor]

No idea. HOWEVER

 

With all the same hardware, and just a different board/cpu. The quad core phenom at 2.4ghz outperforms the Pentium 4 3.8ghz by about 60%

 

Though it could be that I have a generic motherboard vs a good nVidia board.

 

Anyways. What I do to get the core on Oblivion is just assign all the other processes (small XP install, very few processes running) to core 4 and then Oblivion will most likely start on the first core (or at least the first 3)

 

Then they are all open for it's sole usage :P