CPU Upgrades

My girlfriend's PC is long overdue for an upgrade. She's been running an Intel PDC 2140 (1.6ghz dual core) for just about two years now. While I've enjoyed a nice Intel e8400 (3.0ghz core2duo). Microcenter is running a combo deal on the newer AMD Athlon II X4 620 (2.6ghz quad core) and Gigabyte motherboards. I opted for the GA-MA785gm-US2H originally $99, combo deal was $49.99 out the door. The AMD Athlon II x4 620 was $95. I figured the X4 620 would give her a nice upgrade.

Motherboard/CPU swaps are always straight forward. Unplug everything, remove motherboard, install motherboard, reconnect all the wires, power on, and check the BIOS. This one was no different than any other. This Gigabyte BIOS is not much different than my Gigabyte P45 board. CPU had a temp of 32 at idle. Ran memtest86 a few times, then checked the temp again, 40 degrees. Appears the heat sink and fan are working correctly.

Rebooted into Slackware64-current just to make sure everything was recognized and still worked. Besides needing to run alsaconfig again, everything was perfect, a little too perfect. This new setup was quite fast. Without benchmarks, I'd say it feels just as peppy, if not more, than my e8400.

My girlfriend does little with her PC besides browse some websites, a bit of word processing, jam some tunes, and play a few games. No video/audio editing nor encoding, no compiling, not really anything that needs this much power. This is when I decided to see which setup would be faster for me.

Using the built in timer in my head (read non sophisticated benchmarks) I tested which one was quicker at doing some of the tasks I normally do. Using handbrake, the x4 620 was of course much faster (2 cores vs 4), compiling larger programs were quicker on the AMD as well. But what really surprised me, was the fact that poorly threaded, and single threaded programs showed virtually no difference between the two CPUs. I expected the e8400 to walk all over the x4 620. It didn't. The e8400 was faster with oggenc and xvid encoding, not enough to forget about the extra 2 cores on the 620.

In the end, my girlfriend ended up with the e8400 and (IMO) stellar Gigabyte P45 motherboard, while I got a new AMD Athlon II X4 620, and the (IMO) entry level MA785GM motherboard. Not that I was taking full advantage of everything the P45 had to offer. We both received worthwhile upgrades. This should hold me down for a little while longer while i7/i5 prices drop. Or who knows, maybe I'll get another AMD.