Eight-Core

[Select]

http://kotaku.com/358403/eight+core-mot ... l-children

[Ddrak]

Because that way you can play a game and never have task manager read above 12.5%!

Dd

[Tarfang_Trubasher]

Might have to turn in my "geek card" but...

I agree with most of the comments, that looks more useful as a server board vs. a gaming machine board.

Game companies are lucky to be programming proper code for dual cores, let alone 4 or 8.

Now, in a year or 3....mmmm...

-TF

[Bahd Zoolander]

All of the reviews I've read say that it's a substandard motherboard with many of the options that enthusiasts like missing. The benchmarks for it are poor.

[Rsak]

Having a dedicated processor for your game can be pretty helpful...

However from practicality all the current quad/eight core pcs are offering is the ability to have other tasks (IM/Skype, Torrents, etc) running on other cores to reduce the effects on your game. The age of true multicore processing in games is not here yet. Its only now coming into fruition in some of your graphical apps like AutoCad and 3d graphic software packages.

[Ddrak]

I've yet to see a game actually utilize 2 cores fully (let alone 4), so saying you need more than that for background tasks means you're doing some pretty serious processing in the background. IM+P2P+whatever shouldn't be chewing more than 1-2% of any CPU.

The gaming advantage of 4 cores over 2 is solely in games with threaded physics (like, say, Crysis) where particle effects and the like can be thrown over onto a different core. It won't load down those cores very much, but will get things done in parallel at critical portions of each frame and so keep the frame rates higher when there's lots of eye candy flying around.

Of course, other apps that are more easily multithreaded (video encoding, etc.) will definitely see a large boost from more cores, but your return on investment drops off so sharply after 2 cores right now that I'd barely consider the extra expense worthwhile over more/faster memory, larger HDD or RAID controllers.

Dd

[Mukik]

that is one bad ass retarded policeman!

wait...wrong thread

[Partha]

Of course, other apps that are more easily multithreaded (video encoding, etc.) will definitely see a large boost from more cores, but your return on investment drops off so sharply after 2 cores right now that I'd barely consider the extra expense worthwhile over more/faster memory, larger HDD or RAID controllers.

Expense isn't that much if you're not trying to build ZOMG CRYSISMACHINE. I just built a nice AMD Phenom rig that works quite well for less than $1500.

[Flunkie]

I'm not sure about Microsoft's licensing practices now, but desktop operating systems used to be limited to two processors unless you had the Pro or Enterprise version which would handle four processors. Their reasons for this have to do with running things like SQL server on a workstation. They may have changed things, but I'd be surprised if they allowed eight processors for their workstation OS's.

[Ddrak]

Workstation stuff is limited to 2 *physical* processors, so 2 4-core CPUs is fine. They had to change XP at around the sp1 mark to allow for this.

Dd

[Minute]

Yeah I have to say I was disappointed a bit. When I built my quad machine and it really didn't have any speed advantages over my dual. In fact, when I originally build it I threw my extra crap in there. So the new quad had 800mhz memory & a 7200 rpm drive. The dual with the 10k rpm drive and 1033mhz memory was faster. Eventually I threw everything into my quad. 8800 ultra, 1200mhz memory, and a raptor which of course made it awesome but still... those quads IMO aren't worth the money at this time. I'm sure that over time it will pickup the advantages of the 2 extra cores, but my guess is that by then we'll have like a trazillion cores and it will have skipped it.

[Rsak]

Intel and Microsoft are donating 20 million to research on parallel and multicore processing:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Multicor ... 1357.shtml