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[zmc]

I am going to put together a Sandy Bridge system for Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft once the new, revised boards are out. I was wondering whether it makes sense to get as many cores as possible. The high end i7s have four cores and Hyper Threading so you basically have eight cores available. But does DF even make use of that or is it going to in the future? Seeing how a lot of CPU power goes into path finding which I guess can be parallelized.
If not then I'm probably better off with a lower end model and strong overclocking - to get the max out of the usable core.

Regards,
ZMC

[blizzerd]

get as high as possible herts, anything above 4 roulating cores is useless, since df can only use 1 core and having 1 for the operating system and 1 as "cooling down" seems as optimised as possible

id go for the I5 2500k, then overclock it (will be far FAR superior for dwarffortress then the I7 2600k,especialy when you know its also far cheaper and also superior to the I7 2600k on 60+% of the applications you will use)

also the revised boards are crap atm, unless you care about having 8 hhd's, just try to get a hold of the "broken" boards, then when it breaks (4 year warranty, and its just that the motherboard stops recognising your harddrives on boot, not like it breaks the harddrives or stops in the middle of a session anything) just trade it in

[zmc]

None of the retailers I know and trust sell broken Sandy Bridge boards anymore. They all are offering "B3 / Revision 3" suffixed boards now. And seeing how I have three hard disks in my machine right now... I want a healthy SATA controller :-)

Anyhow, the 2500k was exactly what I was looking at so I'll go for it. It is a bummer DF doesn't parallelize path finding etc. though. I imagine it would be a lot faster. In fact it should probably make path finding non-blocking, just put all the path finding requests in a queue and fork a couple threads to work on them.

[helf]

The "broken" boards won't even stop recognizing your hdds unless you are using ports other than the onboard 6gbit. The onboard 3gbit sata is where the trouble is at. You could pop a $20 sata pci-e controller in a busted board and be fine forever, and still use the two 6gbit for your optical or boot ssd or whatever.

But, yeah, go with just a plain quad clocked as high as you can. There are a million threads on DF and multiple cpus, so that topic has been covered quite extensively. At the moment, DF doesn't make use of multiple cores.

When I'm playing, I change the CPU affinity for all other processes to ignore a core, and then tell the DF process to use only that core. Helps some.

Fast, low latency ram also helps a lot.

[janglur]

The fastest processor *for single thread apps* is the AMD T1100 (in 3.7 GHz mode), with the Intel i7 2600K in close second.


More cores don't mean jack for DF, since it's single threaded.

[AlBravo]

If you are building a sandy bridge rig for DF go for fastest single clock rate.  With sandy bridge that means the i7 2600K @ 3.8GHz Turbo.  Though Toms Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-overclocking-processor-recommendation,2866-4.html) has a good article about value and recommends the i5 2500K.  Whichever you choose make sure you get a "K" processor because it has an unlocked CPU multiplier so you can overclock.

also the revised boards are crap atm,

What do mean here?  I'm working on a new sandy bridge build and am right in the middle of motherboard research.

[blizzerd]

The fastest processor *for single thread apps* is the AMD T1100 (in 3.7 GHz mode), with the Intel i7 2600K in close second.


More cores don't mean jack for DF, since it's single threaded.

its kinda meaningless the amdt1100 and intel I7 2600k are faster if only by 1% to the i52500k on single core processes in "some" cases if the i5 2500 costs only half of what the other 2 do

i5 2500k atm is the best processor

[Jay]

Considering that 1366 and 1156 are both essentially "done", you may want to wait and see what they'll have to offer in the upcoming 2011-pin-socket's midrange.   8 cores instead of 4 won't explicitly help you with DF, but the improved architecture on the new chipsets -should- glean more out of the cores you have.