Dothan verses Northwood

N

nbohr1more

Newcomer
I know this is silly but... I would like to know how a Desktop Dothan CPU would fare in Multi-Core oriented games verses P4 Northwood... Yes, both are considered to be below specification but there is at least some evidence that games like GTAIV and Ghostbusters can be run on Single Core AMD chips and/or P4's... It seems that Hyperthreading has given the P4 a little bit of extra kick but how does it fare against a far superior single threaded CPU? Anyone in here have a Dothan gaming laptop?
 
Hyperthreading on the P4 usually degraded performance in games by a few percent and isn't the Dothan faster clock-for-clock than the Northwood? If you can clock the Dothan to Northwood levels it should win in games but Hyperthreading should make the Northwood more responsive elsewhere.
 
Davros said:
I new that was true for single threaded games, but multithreaded games ?
Click to expand...
Yeah, single threaded games. I have no idea if it helps in multithreaded games. Maybe it does. I have a P4 Northwood, but I hate it and I won't benchmark it to save my life.
 
i have one too (p4 3ghz), why do you hate it, it was certainly better than its competition the amd 3000+ imho
 
I think the main problem with Pentium M and Core was that they just weren't clocked high enough to really compete with P4/Athlon64 chips.
Once you overclocked them, you could get into that performance category... but well, Northwood wasn't such a bad overclocker either. Especially the 2.4C models were notorious overclockers. I think in general Northwood would be the better gaming CPU.
 
Well, my curiosity is still peaked... Davros do you have at least a SM3.0 card in that Northwood system? Do you have GTAIV, Ghostbusters or Gears of War (games listed as requiring Dual Core but have evidence of working on Single Core systems)?
 
The thing with Pentium M and Core is that they are notebook chips. They max out at like 25W TDP. AMD simply didn't have chips with the same performance at that power level at the time. I've always though it was impressive to see such a low power CPU match almost AMD's finest 90-100W CPUs at the time. P-M went up to 2.26 GHz, which isn't AMD's 2.6 GHz of the time but it's not that far away.

Pentium M outperforms VIA Nano on both power and performance, btw. Folks frothing for Nano seemed to miss that it is beaten in its niche by a 4 year old CPU.
 
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Aren't VIA's CPU's the last gasp of Cyrex? I'm not sure who'd be frothing over that... I'm still surprised that people are hot and bothered about Intel's Atom processors because it doesn't have good OOO and other In-Order mobile CPU's don't have x86 overhead (and power usage)... doesn't make sense...
 
nbohr1more i have a 7600gt
i do have GTAIV, + Gears of War, but not on that pc
can you suggest any other games that i could benchmark I know q3 supported smp but they broke it in the later patches

Heres what I have installed on it (just re-installed windows and as its not my gaming machine I haven't got round to testing them, but they should work)
 
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this is from the readme of the quake4 smp patch

"Performance Enhancement for dual core processors and Intel(r)
Hyper-Threading technology:
This update enables Quake 4 to take advantage of the Hyper-Threading
technology of Intel(r) Dual core processors. Players who have computer
systems with this processor will notice significant performance gains
in Quake 4. With the update, systems with a single core processor which
uses the Hyper-Threading technology will have a performance jump of 25%
compared to non Hyper-threaded processors. Dual core processors with
Hyper-Threading technology will see a performance increase of up to 87%.
In short, systems with this technology will see the game run much faster
than ever before"
 
...of the top of my head, HL2 Ep2 is supposed to have Multi-Core support... also Bioshock, UT3, Crysis, The Witcher, Call of Duty 2 & 4...
 
Unreal Engine 3 and Crysis definitely use more than one core. HL2 EP2 does not AFAIK.

nbohr1more said:
Aren't VIA's CPU's the last gasp of Cyrex? I'm not sure who'd be frothing over that... I'm still surprised that people are hot and bothered about Intel's Atom processors because it doesn't have good OOO and other In-Order mobile CPU's don't have x86 overhead (and power usage)... doesn't make sense...
Click to expand...

Actually VIA bought Cyrix and basically fired everyone. They found that Cyrix was a mess at the time, with unhappy people, bad management and unproductive projects. So they ended up just keeping the Cyrix IP. Then they bought Centaur. So chips like C3, C5, C7 and Nano are being make by ex Centaur people actually. Winchip legacy.

Atom is interesting because it's a ~2W x86 CPU. For what it is, it's a very impressive CPU. There are no other x86 CPUs that can compete with it on power consumption. It would be really nice if it had a decent ultra low power chipset to go with it. I could really go for a netbook/subnote that doesn't get hot.
 
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i'll try some of those games tomorrow I can turn hyperthreading off in the bios its not worth me trying crysis its going to gpu limited on a 7600gt (on a 4 lane pci-e slot)
 
Thanks Davros!
For GTAIV I've heard that you will need to severely reduce the traffic density and it may be helpful to use the Blur Tweak (Ultimate Tweak) from GTA Garage (supposed to smooth out low framerates)...
 
i dont have gta4 on it (the folder named gta4 contains gta3 san andreas, sequale to gta3 so i called it gta4)

just tried quake 4 but when i type in com_drawfps 1 into the console it says command not recognized
 
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Davros said:
i dont have gta4 on it (the folder named gta4 contains gta3 san andreas, sequale to gta3 so i called it gta4)
Click to expand...
Logic error!

Vice City should be GTA4, and San Andreas should be GTA5 by your reasoning.
 
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