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Best CPU for a single threaded, CPU intensive game?

dargie25

dargie25

dargie25

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11 Jun 2009
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I have a particular game that I like to play called X3: Terran Conflict, its a bit unusual in that CPU is usually a far more limiting factor for performance on this game then the graphics card. It also doesn't help that the game is single threaded =/

I'm considering a CPU upgrade to try and squeeze the best performance out of a single thread, even if the resulting CPU is a duel core.

It doesn't really matter if it is AMD or Intel as long as the price isnt over 250 pounds. I know enough technically to build my own PC's but would appreciate some help choosing a CPU for this rather specific need lol.

Heres a quick overview of what I have at the moment:

Phenom II 3.7Ghz X4 B50 (over-clocked obviously)
4 Gb DDR2 800mhz in duel channel (Ill upgrade this along with motherboard at same time as CPU)
GTX 460 1Gb
1TB HDD
32GB SSD
850W Modular PSU

With my current CPU stable at 3.7, are there any CPU's under 250 pounds that would be worth upgrading to for a single threaded application?

Edit: oh I'm perfectly willing to over-clock, so maybe that factors in maybe not :)
 
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So you're saying that there is a game that your current CPU can't handle?
I'll look for faults in your setup or OS rather than a new CPU.

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What res / details you run at and what FPS do you get ?
460 is a good little card but it's not a high end card so don't expect it to run everything maxed out with 32AA at high res with 100FPS.
 
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You have no need to upgrade as nothing will give you any noticeable performance boost, if the game is not working well i'd do as PhoenixUK says and look at your setup and OS
 
imo a quad core Phenom 2 at 3.7ghz... is plenty fast for the next 2 years...

I understand what your saying.

But, is it worth upgrading your cpu for a single game? Even when you yourself are saying you would actually take a downgrade to achive better performence.

Newer games are going to be more gpu bound, and the your cpu is plenty fast to enable good frams from the top gpus...
 
Game spec intel core duo 2GHz or amd eqivalent, have you got the latest patch's, etc, for X3 TC[ came out 2008] and your PC driver's up to date? your spec for the game is sound!!!!
 
I can assure you everything is up to date ;) anyone who owns this game will tell you how resource hungry it is, people with higher specification rigs than mine will still comment on the games own forum about how bad it can be when at peak load. However squeezing a hew hundred extra mhz out of the CPU definitely helps as I found when I first overclocked the x4 (really an x2 550 but cores unlocked and stable)

If as your all saying however that theirs really no more single threaded performance to be had out there i'll just have to live with it.
 
If you bought i3 and upgraded your cooling to better and Oced to 4.5ghz, you'll maybe see around 15% increase at best, so if your frames are bad already which lets say, bad for me would mean around 30fps, you're looking at maybe 3-4fps extra?

Ask yourself is it really worth it ??


And I still can't believe it your rig can't run this game, I found some old benches at back in 2008 I havn't found a single one showing the game to run at under 30fps and that was at 2560x1900.
 
I didn't say it ran badly, its only in certain situations large battles, huge swarms of missiles being fired ect. I'm not here to justify the game.
 
The intel processors are the ones you need to look at when it comes to work done on a single core. But obviously moving over to intel for the one game would be a tad silly, but thats upto you ofcourse.

Have you tried installing the game to your SSD? As it could be access times causing the lag, rather than processing.
 
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I'm sure I saw some benches in which hyperthreading hurt performance slightly in single threaded games, in which case i5 760 clocked to 4GHz plus is your best bet.

Huge amount to spend to get one game working though.
 
Liampope said:
Disable HT then! Very unlikely to get an i5 760 up to 4.4GHz+ on 'normal' cooling.
Click to expand...

i5 doesn't support hyper threading.

OP: Your best bet would be to get an i3 and overclock it to 4.4ghz with some good cooling. But honestly, I don't think it's worth it. But it's your money and for all we know that's your favourite game of all time :D. People might judge but I know a lot of people who would do the same for WoW or Call of Duty lol
 
 
If you getting spikes with your cpu at 3.7 then ull still get spikes with i3 at 4.4. The difference isn't going to be big enough. Try disabling 2 of ur cores and oc to 4ghz and see if that makes any difference.

What some people don't realize is that even when game isn't optimized for quads, other still might run better on them due to to the fact that you can assign single core for it anew have these other cores for the rest.

Also if u run at high res with lots pc AA then gpu will give you more boast than cpu.
 
Puppetmaster said:
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=48504&processor=i5-680&spec-codes=SLBTM

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43556&processor=i5-670&spec-codes=SLBLT

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43553&processor=i5-661&spec-codes=SLBNE,SLBTB

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43550&processor=i5-660&spec-codes=SLBLV,SLBTK

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=48750&processor=i5-655K&spec-codes=SLBXL

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43546&processor=i5-650&spec-codes=SLBLK,SLBTJ

All those have hyper threading.
Click to expand...


Liampope said:
Disable HT then! Very unlikely to get an i5 760 up to 4.4GHz+ on 'normal' cooling.
Click to expand...


None of those processors are the i5 760, I hope you know the difference between a 750 and 650.

Also, congrats on linking the same product 5 times with different multipliers.
 
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