Oh, more important than CPU speed - don't skimp on your graphics card! Get the best you can get, or if you can't afford it, whatever you do, do NOT get the Intel GMA950 integrated graphics.
While the ATIs can be upgraded to NVidia at a later date, the Intel GMA950 cannot be upgraded to anything.
I am buying a new notebook and I am looking at the E1705 with the Core 2 Duo T7200. Im kinda unfamiliar with the new processors and I want to make sure that I can play some (if not most) of the recent games. I know the new processors give a lot of info per cycle, but most games (to my knowledge) require a processor at least faster that 2GHz. With this being the new breed of processors, will this handle the processing demands of new games??
Yes it will.
Raw clock speed of a processor is not the sole measure of performance. Processors vary in terms of how much work they can do per clock cycle, the exact nature of this variance can be dependent on the type of work the processor does.
The old Pentium 4 was always known for being horribly inefficient for most applications in terms of work done per clock cycle. (About the only thing it was good at was video compression and decompression, and the workload presented by most games was notorious for being something the P4 was bad at and the Athlon was good at). Intel themselves even knew this and were betting on ramping up the P4's clock speed to compensate, which worked for a while until the 3.5-3.8 GHz+ range, at which point Intel ran into a thermal brick wall (the high clock speed made their P4s run too hot.)
Back in the early days, AMD Athlons were known for performing on par with a P4 running at around 1.5 times its clock speed, which is why AMD moved to the speed rating system used by the Athlon XP and all Athlon 64s - the speed rating number is not the CPU's clock speed, but representative of an "equivalent" P4 when averaging the scores from a variety of benchmarks. For example, the Athlon XP 2800+ was a 2.0 GHz processor which was (typically) equivalent to a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4.
Since then, AMD's CPUs have become even more efficient in terms of work done per clock cycle, and so have Intel's with the new Core/Core 2 processors, especially the Core 2. At 2 GHz, I would expect a single core of a Core 2 CPU to be the equivalent of a 3.2-3.5 GHz or so Pentium 4. The trend in modern games is to begin supporting multiprocessor systems now that dual core CPUs are mainstream, so this will make the Core 2 Duo shine even more.
Entropy42
529 Posts
0
December 7th, 2006 12:00
While the ATIs can be upgraded to NVidia at a later date, the Intel GMA950 cannot be upgraded to anything.
Entropy42
529 Posts
0
December 7th, 2006 12:00
Yes it will.
Raw clock speed of a processor is not the sole measure of performance. Processors vary in terms of how much work they can do per clock cycle, the exact nature of this variance can be dependent on the type of work the processor does.
The old Pentium 4 was always known for being horribly inefficient for most applications in terms of work done per clock cycle. (About the only thing it was good at was video compression and decompression, and the workload presented by most games was notorious for being something the P4 was bad at and the Athlon was good at). Intel themselves even knew this and were betting on ramping up the P4's clock speed to compensate, which worked for a while until the 3.5-3.8 GHz+ range, at which point Intel ran into a thermal brick wall (the high clock speed made their P4s run too hot.)
Back in the early days, AMD Athlons were known for performing on par with a P4 running at around 1.5 times its clock speed, which is why AMD moved to the speed rating system used by the Athlon XP and all Athlon 64s - the speed rating number is not the CPU's clock speed, but representative of an "equivalent" P4 when averaging the scores from a variety of benchmarks. For example, the Athlon XP 2800+ was a 2.0 GHz processor which was (typically) equivalent to a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4.
Since then, AMD's CPUs have become even more efficient in terms of work done per clock cycle, and so have Intel's with the new Core/Core 2 processors, especially the Core 2. At 2 GHz, I would expect a single core of a Core 2 CPU to be the equivalent of a 3.2-3.5 GHz or so Pentium 4. The trend in modern games is to begin supporting multiprocessor systems now that dual core CPUs are mainstream, so this will make the Core 2 Duo shine even more.