AMD Turion 64 MT-40 2.2Ghz dual core?

there's an x2 thing on the add, but it's not in the name. i know nothing about amd... is this a dual core chip?

 

Nope, Its single core. All dual core processors will have a model name begining with a TL and go upto 2.0GHz. The MT/ML are single core Turions based on Skt 754.

 

thanks. why does this system have an x1600 in it then? i thought those only came with dual cores while the x700 was on singles...

 

The GPU has nothing to do with what processor it can be paired with. You can pair a X1600 with any processor. It does not matter even if it is dual core or not. The only Turion+X1600 combo that I know of is the MSI 1039.

In any case there are other single core Turions which are paired with even faster Geforce 7900GS as well...
http://www.alienware.com/product_de...-LT-AURORA-M-9700&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT#pdp-nav

 

MSI makes some Socket 754 notebooks with X1600's. Heck, Alienware sells a S754 notebook with dual 7900GS's. The most recent designs are all Turion X2's though.

 

Odd, because games would play better on a single core.

 

They probably wouldn't play better or worse. Depends on the clockspeed of the CPU though. The Turion X2 is basically two Turion 64's on one chip; if you take a single- and dual-core Turion clocked at the same speed with the same amount of cache (ex: Turion 64 MT-34 vs. Turion 64 X2 TL-56), which are both have a 1.8GHz clockspeed and have 512k cache/core, the single-threaded performance will be basically the same, but the dual-core CPU will be ~2-3% faster playing games because the one core can handle the background processes while the other handles the game; a single-core CPU would have to do both (you wouldn't notice the performance difference, so for all general purposes the performance is the same). Now if you take a Turion 64 ML-44 (2.4GHz) vs a Turion X2 TL-56, then the former is going to be faster in games.

Once games become multithreaded (can use multiple processors), then dual-core will be best of course. All the fastest processors today are dual-core (read Core Duo/Core 2 Duo).

Comment: With regards to the Alienware m9700, the one with the dual Go7900GS + Turion 64 single-core, and their mALX, with dual Go7900GTX's and a single-core Turion, those are a pretty silly combos. The Turion 64 is a very poor match for those video cards because it is simply not powerful enough to let them reach their potential and drags down peak performance considerably. The reasoning behind that is because once you have two video cards like that together, the bottleneck is transferred from the GPU to the CPU, and if the CPU is weak, well then that's a problem.

/rant