A Year and a Half Later and Finally Ready for Dual Core Processors

Three hundred dollar initial entry price tags along with zero support in the gaming world kept me from making the leap to joining the "two cores are better than one" ideology. Early justifications for the transition ranged from increasing the performance of your foreground programs while background tasks such as firewall and antivirus software ate up an entire additional core to promises of significant improvements to the very few multi-threaded programs available to the public for everyday tasks. Then along came Intel's Conroe core and "Core2Duo" became the buzzword of the next leap in computing. Though sold on the performance of the processor, the cost of ownership couldn't be justified due to expensive motherboards and the inclusion of DDR2 RAM which was very expensive at the time.

Fast-forward eighteen months and I can hardly find a reason not to shell out the less than $100 clams necessary to make my aging AMD socket 939 motherboard and RAM accept an additional physical core. As the popularity of the Core2Duo skyrocketed over a year earlier, I'd calculated the transition costing $600 easily between the new motherboard, still overpriced RAM, and willingness to finally pay more than $100 for a new cpu. Within the last few months, online vendors have really been pushing to offload their socket 939 stock, whereas not much before that point there was plenty of price gouging aimed at individuals attempting not to upgrade via complete system rebuilds. My new AMD64 X2 4200 would have cost me well over $400 when it debuted, but I paid less than $80 for it and still it continues to drop in price by tiny amounts.

Am I satisfied? Completely. Rather than running a second computer during cpu intensive tasks as I'd done in the past mostly during time consuming video or audio encoding, this new cpu does it all without breaking a sweat. As for real world performance improvements, what I see most everyday are much shorter times for virus scans and winrar decompressions. Plus, thanks to better utilization of current video game console hardware, PC games are finally taking advantage of dual core processors. On my now aging Nvidia 7800GT for which the current generation of graphics cards boast double the performance at my same price point, recent games such as Bioshock and Stranglehold run flawlessly thanks to their dual core optimizations.

The downside? All of this added capability for increased multitasking has pushed me into the world of widescreen monitors - an area I'd also previously shunned due to lack of support in PC games. There's a world of difference between a 17" LCD that's almost five years old and my brand new 24" LCD. My web browser or other current task takes up just over half the screen space leaving boundaries all around for keeping tabs on other tasks running in the background. Gaming at the native 1920x1200 resolution leaves something to desire since despite any slowdown that may occur at that resolution, I have yet to see a game that supports textures that size. Stretching a now very common widescreen resolution of 1680x1050 (the maximum for 22" LCD monitors) looks the same and plays much better than a native 1920x1200.

In conclusion, upgrading to a dual core cpu along with being forced into a widescreen monitor upgrade gives me more space in which to work and play whether its multitasking, comparing items side by side, actually involving myself with multi threaded activities, or just surfing and watching tv without the DVR program hiccuping from time to time due to overworking a single core processor