Whats better for gaming

[jsmc]

My phenom ll x2 555 unlocks and oc to 3.7 as a quad but if I run it as a duel I can oc to 4.1. I was wondering of the two extra cores make much of a difference in newer titles or if the extra speed is better.

[Danny Nissan]

I would say most definatly quad and 3.7GHz in the general case.

But for example skyrim doesnt really use more than 1-2 cores, and thus 4.1ghz dualcore would outperform.

Have you tried using ACC and put +4 on the cores 3 and 4 (the ones you unlock)? Maybe you can get 3.8 or so.

[meerkat154]

My phenom ll x2 555 unlocks and oc to 3.7 as a quad but if I run it as a duel I can oc to 4.1. I was wondering of the two extra cores make much of a difference in newer titles or if the extra speed is better.

I would lean to dual at 4.1ghz. Not many games use more than 2 cores.
-Kat

[Ristogod]

Despite games not fully utilizing all the cores available, there isn't much of an overall performance difference between 3.7 and 4.1. However, there is a big difference in 2 vs 4 cores when any game or application can make use of them. So despite that there is only a few that can make use of more cores, they'll probably benefit more by having the extra cores than that little bit of speed difference with only 2 cores.

[jsmc]

So after doing a few tests I found the unlocked cpu to be faster in a majority of games. This seems odd to me as I would of thought that the faster speed would of made more of a difference but it may just be this chip.

As far as using acc to go higher at 4 cores that option was removed from the bios on 800 series chipsets. so I'm using the core unlocker from asus.

Thanks guys.

[Redshirt_X]

Depending on what you were playing, that's probably not that strange...multicore support is still weird from time to time, but most modern games won't turn their nose up at a quad-core.