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The Core architecture prefetching is without any doubt superior to what can be found in the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4. There are no less than three prefetchers - two data, one instruction - in each core, plus two prefetchers for the L2-cache. With eight prefetchers active in one dual-core Core CPU, all those prefetchers could easily get in the way of the "demand" bandwidth - the bandwidth which is needed by the load operations of the running program. In order to avoid this bottleneck, the prefetch monitor of the Core CPUs always give priority to the demand bandwidth; the prefetchers will never steal too much bandwidth away from the running program.

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Yes, Intel's Core does not use the aggressive domino and LVS circuit-design strategy that NetBurst designs used to achieve stunning clockspeeds. At the same time, it is a fat, massive reordering CPU which gives free lunch to developers who don't want to spend too much time on debugging heavily threaded applications.

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Originally posted by Rich justifying throwing money away on an old computer:

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I should never have bought the 3850 agp, which has locked me into the old technology - but I did it little pieces at a time. This last bit of investment in old crap will be the final flourish for this little highly ventilated case - with Jeff's new vf1000 cooling the hell out of that 3850, and the arctic cooling the 3.8ghz chip that's coming - (I won the auction - seventy bucks) - and I have my eye on 2 gigs of ebay ram to finish the load out (don't scream) THAT WHOLE LOT will buy me at least 10 more fps on Left 4 Dead, I'm convinced, and if they don't make Left 4 Dead 2 much more system-challenging, I'll be fine for 6-8 months until the real i7 spending begins, lol.

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Originally posted by sam plunging the dagger into rich:

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Cheap though the P4 670 was, you still paid $70 for a CPU worth $25. Remember that.

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Originally posted by shaff:

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most newer cases come with 8 pcie slots at the back, so even if the dual card slot goes over the bottom of the mobo its supported.

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Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst? 9.8 Driver

Our test system configuration is: AMD Phenom II 940 (3.0GHz) processor Asus M3A79-T(790) motherboard 4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 memory Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit

This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:

* Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireX? technology.
* Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
* Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
* Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
* Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
* Tom Clancy?s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
* UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
* UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
* World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.

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