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Dang I wish I would have looked here first. I just got a used AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad-Core 2.4 GHz in a desktop with 8GB Ram plan on putting ESI Juli@ in it next week. If I had known, I would have went with core 2 duo. Hopefully it will run the program, as my pentium 4 3.0 ran it just fine.
In fact, for you (in my opinion) even an old LGA 775 E8400 dual core would be better for ST. According to passmark site, x4 9750 gets about 28350 points on average (4 threads), while E8400 gets roughly 2160 (per 2 threads). That gives quite a noticable difference of processing power per thread (in favor of Intel). It gets worse, when you compare cheap-as-dirt newer series, such as Celeron G1630 (LGA 1155), which matches the Phenom of yours in passmark (and this takes into account all threads the processor is able to process simultaneously).
Recently I have had 3 rigs, two with AMD processors (Athlon II x4 620, FX 8320) and one with Intel, i3-3220T. This little i3 matched FX 8320 effortlessly as far as ST is concerned. So did my mobile i5 3210m (2 cores, 4 threads) in laptop.
Notice, these dual cores i3/i5 are also equivalent of Phenom II x4 945, which is quad. See my point here?
The faster the single thread of your processor is, the better it will perform in ST. This is important, as Hans mentioned numerous times, ST uses only 2 threads, at least for now.
It doesn't mean that AMD processors are bad overall. They're not, but AMDs are better for something else, that doesn't rely on single threaded power (transcoding for example).
The only really bad thing in latest AMD processors, is their power consumption and thus relatively high heat dissapation requirements.
My FX 8320 was a beast in that matter. Marked as TDP 125W processor, when fully loaded (and not overclocked)
drew over 140 Watts from socket (yes, checked that twice using wattmeter between idle and loaded states) and needed a huge radiator for the long run (it's hard to dissapate that amount of heat, even though the case was well ventilated with 4 fans, 12 cm each). Using it only for ST would be very impractical, as it has 8 threads (ST can't benefit from that) and more importantly,
if you want the things to work stable, you don't want them to get excessively hot, right? When running rig for 24/7 power consumption starts to matter as well.
I could talk about it forever, as
all of the above matter a lot and thus for ST running device, when reliability is crucial, components should be picked up with care.
BUT: If your hardware runs just fine and is sufficient - stick with it until it gets old enough to replace the whole platform (or hardware requirements increase significantly, then you'll have to upgrade anyway).
Regards,
Slawomir