Adventures in Kentsfield

I’ve been playing with my new Kentsfield Q6600 Quad-Core CPU, seeing what kind of benefit it would provide in the real world. So I’ve been doing the same stuff I always do in the real world, but paying closer attention to performance. Here are the results of my very unscientific tests.

The first thing I did was play Call of Duty 4 at higher settings. It felt smooth, but this test was hardly practical as I had never really seen it lag. So I just wrote the CoD4 Review and moved on to greater things.

I sat for a moment and tried to think of the most poorly-performing game I could think of, and it hit me: Supreme Commander. The obvious ripoff of Total Annhiliation, right down to the bugs. It seemed obvious to me upon the first play of SupCom that the testers must have been using computers that don’t exist yet; otherwise it never would have made it to the shelves with its framerates in large battles.

So I played Supreme Commander for a couple hours today, watching my task manager in hopes of seeing a performance increase. Sure enough, the large battles are still laggy. Why? One obvious reason is that it was only using one core. A game like Supreme Commander really needs to be multi-processor aware; alas, it is not. Bah.

I’d run benchmarks, but then I’d have to put the old Core 2 Duo dual-core CPU back in to compare; and these stock LGA775 heatsinks are a pain to remove and install. Besides, 3DMarks and Photoshop filter times don’t really apply to my kind of workload.

I did at least find out one cool little info nugget: When you set the affinity of a process from the Task Manager, it remembers your setting when you close and re-open the process. I hadn’t noticed that on the Core 2 Duo. So now I have all system processes running on Core 3 and all normally-open applications running on Core 2. That leaves Cores 0 and 1 totally free for when I want to do some serious number-crunching, gaming, or generally running anything that isn’t multi-processor aware. I’ll probably set Winamp to core 2.