Dual core inadequate for gaming in 2009? There are still far too many single-threaded titles in 2022...

If you're aiming for 2009, at that time the Nehalem Core i7s were pretty much undisputed champions of gaming performance, with the only question being whether higher bandwidth of the So1366 beat lower latencies of So1156. The fact they also happened to have four cores was pretty irrelevant for gaming at the time. The bigger challenge is getting that low TDP dualcore in this timeframe, as AMD CPUs had low power but even lower performance, only their hottest were competitive and Intel's dualcores all needed at least 65W.

The only game I can right now think of that actually benefited from 4 cores pre 2010 is Grand Theft Auto IV, doesn't mean there aren't others but I think going dual core is perfectly fine especially if it supports hyper-threading.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-01, 13:01:

After being content with using a dual core Athlon X2 5000+ between 2005-2008 I moved onto a Phenom X3 8750 in 2009 but I also vaguely remember that the move did not really help much with gaming at all .

I don't doubt that. The Phenom 1 was absolute garbage.

When it comes to dual cores it really comes down to what kind of dual cores are we talking about. i3 CPUs were dual cores with hyper threading and upon their release, the Intel Haswell i3-s still offered decent performance. That was around 2013 I think.

I bought my first dual core, an Athlon 5050e in 2009 and it did alright. With a much more powerful Core2 Duo E8000 series CPU I think you could get by until around 2011-2012. Around that was the time when I upgraded to Phenom II X3 710 paired with a Radeon HD5770, but it was already underpowered for games like Far Cry 3.

dionb wrote on 2022-02-01, 13:28:

Dual core inadequate for gaming in 2009? There are still far too many single-threaded titles in 2022...

If you're aiming for 2009, at that time the Nehalem Core i7s were pretty much undisputed champions of gaming performance, with the only question being whether higher bandwidth of the So1366 beat lower latencies of So1156. The fact they also happened to have four cores was pretty irrelevant for gaming at the time. The bigger challenge is getting that low TDP dualcore in this timeframe, as AMD CPUs had low power but even lower performance, only their hottest were competitive and Intel's dualcores all needed at least 65W.

I am currently using an Athlon64 X2 3600+ Brisbane which is rated 65W but seems to draw around 45W IME due to 1.9GHz clockspeed. It is cool enough to be cooled by a cheapo flower style 65W cooler that also provides airflow for the VRM/RAM etc in a cramped case. It's not a fast CPU, it's also not the ideal CPU for this build but it's what I have on hand. I tried an Athlon II X4 640 in this NetVista case and that thing turned the case into an oven pretty fast. I am hoping to find one of those 45W Energy Efficient e-series processors such as the 4450e/4850e/5050e to replace what I currently have but they were not that common even back in the day so I'm not holding my breath to be honest..

Honestly I feel like dual-core machines were still pretty viable for most gaming up until around the end of the Haswell era, 2014 or thereabouts. I remember the Pentium G3258 "20th Anniversary Edition" being kind of the last hurrah for affordable, unlocked, dual core gaming machines.

Edit: Right about then was when some games started giving issues on duals, IIRC. I upgraded my Haswell Pentium to an i3-4160 because IIRC Dragon Age Inquisition wouldn't run right on a non-hyperthreaded dual.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-01, 13:55:

dionb wrote on 2022-02-01, 13:28:

Dual core inadequate for gaming in 2009? There are still far too many single-threaded titles in 2022...

If you're aiming for 2009, at that time the Nehalem Core i7s were pretty much undisputed champions of gaming performance, with the only question being whether higher bandwidth of the So1366 beat lower latencies of So1156. The fact they also happened to have four cores was pretty irrelevant for gaming at the time. The bigger challenge is getting that low TDP dualcore in this timeframe, as AMD CPUs had low power but even lower performance, only their hottest were competitive and Intel's dualcores all needed at least 65W.

I am currently using an Athlon64 X2 3600+ Brisbane which is rated 65W but seems to draw around 45W IME due to 1.9GHz clockspeed. It is cool enough to be cooled by a cheapo flower style 65W cooler that also provides airflow for the VRM/RAM etc in a cramped case. It's not a fast CPU, it's also not the ideal CPU for this build but it's what I have on hand. I tried an Athlon II X4 640 in this NetVista case and that thing turned the case into an oven pretty fast. I am hoping to find one of those 45W Energy Efficient e-series processors such as the 4450e/4850e/5050e to replace what I currently have but they were not that common even back in the day so I'm not holding my breath to be honest..

If your board supports core unlocking and AM3 chips check out the Sempron 145. It unlocks to a 45watt 5050e 😀 iirc EDIT: OK 4450e.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-01, 13:01:

After being content with using a dual core Athlon X2 5000+ between 2005-2008 I moved onto a Phenom X3 8750 in 2009 but I also vaguely remember that the move did not really help much with gaming at all . I then moved on to an Athlon II X4 640 in 2011 and I remember that actually was a worthwhile CPU upgrade and a quad core actually paid off. However, I can't really put my finger on what year it became actually desirable to have a quad core over a dual core. I bet most people will say 2007/2008 due to Q6600 being very popular at the time but I also remember games not really leveraging those cores at all at the time.. If I had to pick a year I'd probably say 2009 as Nehalem i7 quad cores started to become more common? I'm basically asking because I'm putting together a PC to cover 2005-2009 games and I was wondering if I can get away with using a low TDP dual core for games released in 2008-2009.

When games realised that to push limits they needed to go multithreaded and not with two or three threads, Horizon Zero Dawn will happily scale to 32 threads if you have enough CPU cores for it. Moving to Quad core quickly followed to Quad core with HT and well ...it did sit there for a decade or so and games never really utilised all 8 logical cores most didn't really use more than two, I would say dual core with HT became inadequate around the time Intel and AMD transitioned to more than 4 cores per CPU and the resulting IPC increase.

Up until that point game devs never really bothered using the power available but once they did dual core very quickly became useless for anything besides light gaming and office tasks, this was well after 2009.

To answer your question on a dual-core PC for 2005-2009, grab an E8400 and never look back. It's very cheap, plenty fast (it was the go-to gaming CPU back in 2008-2009) and doesn't consume a whole lot of power and overclocks like a dream. Pair it with a decent P35 or P45 board and you're good to go. ASUS P5K was my mainboard at the time and I think it is my favorite board of all time, zero issues, very stable and completely dependable board at the time. In fact, if you wish to go even lower power, the E8400 was a great candidate for undervolting. You can also get the faster E8600, I seem to remember these being only slightly more expensive, but I haven't checked in a while.

I would avoid anything AM2/AM2+/AM3. The Phenom II line had a lot of great SKUs (I am especially partial to the X3 720) which offered great value with more cores for your buck at the expense of power consumption and per-core performance, however seeing as you will use this system solely for gaming, the timeframe you have given is filled with games that barely took full advantage of two cores, as such anything more than two cores is rather useless, unless of course you move further in time in which case you can get more cores and better single core performance. I would avoid Nehalem i7, they were real beasts but they are still somewhat silly expensive (especially the motherboards). They were not entirely unlike current HEDT systems, aimed at more enthusiast buyers with their triple channel memory support and other exotic features (and yet i7 920 was less than 300$!). Instead, you may consider the socket 1156 CPUs, the i5 750 especially. These are not as expensive as s1366 and still offer a nice boost over Core 2 Duo, although IMO E8400 will be enough for your needs.

As for when the need for more cores began, I agree with what some people above already said, 2013-2014 was essentially the last hurrah. I remember arguing with people online on whether or not i3 with its hyperthreading was still viable. Good times 😀

ARMA II was released in 2009 and required quad core CPU for comfortable play. So that's the year where dual-core became obsolete. Although overclocked to 4200-4500 mhz Core 2 Duo E8xxx could handle it somewhat decently too, which obviously is not low TDP.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-02-01, 14:57:

ARMA II was released in 2009 and required quad core CPU for comfortable play. So that's the year where dual-core became obsolete. Although overclocked to 4200-4500 mhz Core 2 Duo E8xxx could handle it somewhat decently too, which obviously is not low TDP.

The E8600 @ 4.8ghz could handle pretty much anything you threw at it, II only have one E8600 and I wish I had more they are really great CPUs to use if a little expensive for an old CPU and certainly requires some beefy cooling.