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8 Core vs 12 Core - Gaming and General Use.

beany_bot

beany_bot

beany_bot

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Question for the 12 core owners. How often do your 12 cores come in handy (outside of professional rendering and such).

Im considering the 5900x, primarily for gaming, and I hear you saying, "you dont need 12 cores for gaming". However my "gaming" is usually much more than just gaming, If I may paint a reasonably typical picture.
I run a triple monitor setup and often have say Microsoft Flight sim running, Discord open, connected to voice, streaming Flight Sim to discord & watching a friends stream, chrome open many tabs AND playing something light like GZDoom or Among Us all at once. I mean would this scenario have benfit of 12 cores over 8 cores or is 12 still overkill?
 
beany_bot said:
Question for the 12 core owners. How often do your 12 cores come in handy (outside of professional rendering and such).

Im considering the 5900x, primarily for gaming, and I hear you saying, "you dont need 12 cores for gaming". However my "gaming" is usually much more than just gaming, If I may paint a reasonably typical picture.
I run a triple monitor setup and often have say Microsoft Flight sim running, Discord open, connected to voice, streaming Flight Sim to discord & watching a friends stream, chrome open many tabs AND playing something light like GZDoom or Among Us all at once. I mean would this scenario have benfit of 12 cores over 8 cores or is 12 still overkill?
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Since 12 cores is only 100 quid more 8 then I think it makes sense if your planning to keep the CPU long term.
 
Joxeon said:
It Doesn't make much sense upgrading from a zen 2 8 core to a zen 3 8 core. Atleast with a 12 core your getting a real upgrade.
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THIS If you're upgrading then do a proper upgrade not a half measure. I'm certainly not going to replace my 5960X with an 8 core it just makes very little sense given I've had 8 cores for 5 years. Get an upgrade
that will definitely be an upgrade and will last like an upgrade. 8 cores is the minimum a gaming PC should have going forward especially for next gen games. The price difference for the extra cores is relatively tiny too.
 
Joxeon said:
It Doesn't make much sense upgrading from a zen 2 8 core to a zen 3 8 core. Atleast with a 12 core your getting a real upgrade.
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It would be a upgrade either way due to the architectural changes.

On the 5900X you have your 6 core CCX's running over 2 chiplets.
But as you already know I much prefer the 8 core FULL FAT CCX's.

So the real worthwhile upgrade IMHO is to either a 5800X or 5950X.

That is why I keep saying you don't need the 12 core for a gaming PC, save yourself a £100, as the 5800X is actually optimal.

I am running a 3900 in my gaming PC atm and I am more than happy to replace it with a 5800X, it will be a decent improvement.

As for people giving me crap over the base clock not mattering, I think it does.
The 5800X should maintain slightly better 1% and 0.1% lows, but we won't know the margin until the in-depth reviews hit.

Anyway that's my 2 cent.
 
I do stuff like this - spread over 2x 4 core 8 thread i7s of the 4000 series era (though one is being "upgraded" to a Xeon 6/12) (one at 4GHz one at 4.6GHz) so 8 cores would probably manage fine but when I do a full upgrade to something more modern I'm not going to go below 10 core - anything less doesn't give a lot of future wiggle room.
 
The Old School Gamer said:
It would be a upgrade either way due to the architectural changes.

On the 5900X you have your 6 core CCX's running over 2 chiplets.
But as you already know I much prefer the 8 core FULL FAT CCX's.

So the real worthwhile upgrade IMHO is to either a 5800X or 5950X.

That is why I keep saying you don't need the 12 core for a gaming PC, save yourself a £100, as the 5800X is actually optimal.

I am running a 3900 in my gaming PC atm and I am more than happy to replace it with a 5800X, it will be a decent improvement.

As for people giving me crap over the base clock not mattering, I think it does.
The 5800X should maintain slightly better 1% and 0.1% lows, but we won't know the margin until the in-depth reviews hit.

Anyway that's my 2 cent.
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This guy gets it. Top advice and far more succinct than I have managed over on the other thread.

What you describe there is exactly the experience I got when "upgrading" from a good clocking 3800x to a 3900xt. It took real work and disabling multithreading to beat the 3800x in every metric, and in some tests its so close you really cant tell. At no point is the 3800x ever blown away and achieving the performance was FAR easier. It took a motherboard change for a better vrm and a months work to get the 3900xt where I was happy it was an actual upgrade. Still wont post at 1900mhz Infinity fabric though whereas with the 3800x it was easy. Even if you stack the deck in your favour as much as you think you can that random factor can always come along and pull the rug out.

I'm struggling to decide between dropping back to 8 cores or moving up to 16. It'll probably be irrelevant anyway as I'll try and fail to buy a 16 core, fall back to an 8 core and find they're all out of stock too then end up on the 3900XT until next year :p
 
MrPils said:
This guy gets it. Top advice and far more succinct than I have managed over on the other thread.

What you describe there is exactly the experience I got when "upgrading" from a good clocking 3800x to a 3900xt. It took real work and disabling multithreading to beat the 3800x in every metric, and in some tests its so close you really cant tell. At no point is the 3800x ever blown away and achieving the performance was FAR easier. It took a motherboard change for a better vrm and a months work to get the 3900xt where I was happy it was an actual upgrade. Still wont post at 1900mhz Infinity fabric though whereas with the 3800x it was easy. Even if you stack the deck in your favour as much as you think you can that random factor can always come along and pull the rug out.

I'm struggling to decide between dropping back to 8 cores or moving up to 16. It'll probably be irrelevant anyway as I'll try and fail to buy a 16 core, fall back to an 8 core and find they're all out of stock too then end up on the 3900XT until next year :p
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Not everyone buys 3 or 4 CPUs every year so the longevity probably doesn't matter to you but to most people it's an important factor when choosing an upgrade that will last a good few years.
 
Joxeon said:
Not everyone buys 3 or 4 CPUs every year so the longevity probably doesn't matter to you but to most people it's an important factor when choosing an upgrade that will last a good few years.
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We have 6 PCs in the house, upgrades filter downwards. I've done CPU/Motherboards since Ryzen 3000 came out, the last one about to be replaced is a 5960x on a badly aging R5E that sometimes no longer boots. Sadly it never ends with that many PCs, as soon as the CPU upgrade cycle is complete its on to GPUs. Mostly on 1070's with the exception of my own 1080ti I bought 2nd hand two years ago, but the R5E has an RX480. Not everyone has only themselves to think of.

Having been ruined by covid over summer spending 2 months in hospital and another 2 months recovering at home I find myself able to treat myself, my mrs and the kids this xmas because I've spent literally nothing for months. Thanks for your opinion tho it does seem mostly rooted in jealousy. Passive aggressive much? :rolleyes:
 
MrPils said:
We have 6 PCs in the house, upgrades filter downwards. I've done CPU/Motherboards since Ryzen 3000 came out, the last one about to be replaced is a 5960x on a badly aging R5E that sometimes no longer boots. Sadly it never ends with that many PCs, as soon as the CPU upgrade cycle is complete its on to GPUs. Mostly on 1070's with the exception of my own 1080ti I bought 2nd hand two years ago, but the R5E has an RX480. Not everyone has only themselves to think of.

Having been ruined by covid over summer spending 2 months in hospital and another 2 months recovering at home I find myself able to treat myself, my mrs and the kids this xmas because I've spent literally nothing for months. Thanks for your opinion tho it does seem mostly rooted in jealousy. Passive aggressive much? :rolleyes:
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I Really do not care about how many PCs you have and I'm certainly not jealous but it seems when anyone disagrees with you they're met with a condescending attitude.

The point I was making was if your going to be keeping a CPU for any length of time then a 12 core is always going to be better than 8.
 
Joxeon said:
I Really do not care about how many PCs you have and I'm certainly not jealous but it seems when anyone disagrees with you they're met with a condescending attitude.

The point I was making was if your going to be keeping a CPU for any length of time then a 12 core is always going to be better than 8.
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I'm condescending? Perhaps you should read your own posts.

I was agreeing with old school gamer that for gaming use the 8 core will be the "better" choice. I would also have agreed with the sentiment of the last line of your last post that if you are keeping a CPU for a long time the 12 core would be a better buy than an 8. The two views are not mutually exclusive, they are talking about different use cases. The rest of your post is back to that passive aggressive immaturity so evident in teenagers these days. As soon as I figure out how ill be adding you to my ignore list for this site.
 
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