quad core important?

[blogs]

so i was looking at the buying guide for hardware requirements and noticed that your budget cpu has the possibility to unlock 2 extra cores making it a quad.

How important is a quad for running the games smoothly? I'm asking because i'm building a htpc and had chosen a pentium dual e6500 (2.9 ghz) and this cpu outperforms the AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition at factory speeds and in not multi threaded tasks. And it's cheaper and i already had my specs chosen and now i need to think this over...

thx

[boogerlad]

quads benefit in no way.

[Apostacious]

yeah dolphin does not benefit from it atm but you do im idle on tf2 on my left screen and selling stuff on Aion on the right screen while playing wii sports on the main screen

My brother and I used to set it up so he can play in dolphin on one screen and me pcsx2 on another, no lag at all. try that on a dual core

[blogs]

thx for the quick replys

no worries. as i said its for a htpc so i will either be watching a bluray or playing wii For more demanding things i have my gaming pc which is quad btw

One other thing: i had chosen a radeon hd 5450 for the htpc as its passive cooled and perfect for a htpc. Unfortunately it does not have the power of a gaming card but i was wondering if its sufficient for playing at 1360x768

[Ocean]

Yeah, that card is more than enough for that resolution. Also, no, quad cores wont help with dolphin. The only benefit you may get, is that you can for example play dolphin, decode videos, upload file, or do many demanding things at once in the background while playing. For actual gameplay, even a med-high end core 2 duo or core i3 should be enough.

[Roger525]

Absolutely, the HD5450 will do just fine. I'm using it for Dolphin as well @ 720p and my Core i3 is always the bottleneck. I would definitely go higher than an i3 if you have the money, as I believe it isn't quite fast enough for some games.

[Pringles]

Quad helps for recording gameplays. But Dolphin alone won't benefit from it (yet).

[LinkX]

with win 7 x64 and quad core (ht off) i get more performance as two cores

2 cores high load and 2 cores medium-low load
dolphin uses total 60-80 % quad core cpu

i guess its because of win 7 scheduler due to the fact that i got this reaction on other singel / dual core apps

the graphics driver could be the reason too cause off the threaded build

[oohladeeda]

there's an option "lock threads to cores", so really only 2 cores get used.
otherwise you can see sometimes, for example with 3 cores, core 0 80%, core 1 80%, core 2 30% or something like that.
that doesn't mean more cores is better for dolphin, but in some games it really is if "lock threads to cores" isn't activated (although really minor).

sources: my experience with dolphin, may change from revision to revision