Are two cpus better than one?

[Turion 2]

I'm not planning on getting a dual socket motherboard and using it in the near future. But I was wondering if two lesser cpus could measure up to one better one? I know it will get better workstation performance, but that doesn't always mean better gaming. I guess what I'm asking is can games even utilize to cpus or will they just use one by default? 

[WoodenMarker]

It depends on the game. 

Most games rely on fast cores and there isn't any dual socket solution that has cores anywhere as faster as an oc'ed 9900k. 

[Turion 2]

1 minute ago, WoodenMarker said:

It depends on the game. 

Most games rely on fast cores and there isn't any dual socket solution that has cores anywhere as faster as an oc'ed 9900k. 

So lets say a game that could use large multicore processers, would also be able to utilize the dual cpus?

[WoodenMarker]

Just now, Turion 2 said:

So lets say a game that could use large multicore processers, would also be able to utilize the dual cpus?

Yep, I'm sure there's some specific game out there that can use every core effectively. 

[Turion 2]

Just now, WoodenMarker said:

Yep, I'm sure there's some specific game out there that can use every core effectively. 

That's interesting, I know it wasn't that important but thanks for answering my question.

[JacobeeGames]

12 minutes ago, Turion 2 said:

I'm not planning on getting a dual socket motherboard and using it in the near future. But I was wondering if two lesser cpus could measure up to one better one? I know it will get better workstation performance, but that doesn't always mean better gaming. I guess what I'm asking is can games even utilize to cpus or will they just use one by default? 

You are correct about the work station performance being better but gaming is a very different scenario. Now, it really depends on the CPU's and motherboard chosen as well as even ram configurations because of the way dual socket boards split the memory slots. To achieve decent performance on a dual socket motherboard you would need some pretty decently fast CPU's to start with in which case it might even be faster to run single socket anyways. Games really can't use much more than about 4-6 cores at most, and say you have a pair of quad cores, your effectively splitting the workload across two CPU's which can cause issues since it may choose to use 4 from one and 2 from the other instead of 3 and 3, this may cause temp imbalances and possible performance loss on one CPU because of it (its a small issue in comparison) its just really not that great of an experience due to software things. Now say you wanted to game stream or something of that nature, if you could somehow basically dedicate one entire CPU to the game so it doesn't have to communicate between the other CPU for info stored in the other CPU's ram (remember they have separate memory) you could leave the rest of the cores open from the other CPU for encoding, other apps, etc then you may actually be able to achieve a decent experience.

[Windows7ge]

18 minutes ago, Turion 2 said:

I'm not planning on getting a dual socket motherboard and using it in the near future. But I was wondering if two lesser cpus could measure up to one better one? I know it will get better workstation performance, but that doesn't always mean better gaming. I guess what I'm asking is can games even utilize to cpus or will they just use one by default? 

Depends on the game. There's really no point though since games are not a super parallel task. That's where more cores are better. Having 2 physical CPUs don't make things faster rather it extends how many parallel tasks you can run.

 

In theory if you wanted to run several different games all at once more than 1 CPU would give you the horses to do it but it wouldn't make any 1 singular game run faster/better. As you said many/most probably wouldn't even register the 2nd CPU as a resource to use and it'd just sit idle.

 

In some instances this could actually slow games down because of how it'd be trying to share information between CPUs across the QPI (at least for Xeons)