• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Gaming processors?

markyzola

markyzola

markyzola

Associate
Joined
25 Sep 2010
Posts
29
Hello all,

Ive had a good browse through this forum and you all see to know what your talking about!!? So im getting a new gaming rig but ive read that the processor size doesnt bare to much relavence (as long as its half decent)and an i7 980X might be overkill for a gaming rig?

Any feedback? Constructive feedback preferred.
 
These days the graphics card is king, If your on a budget your much better off taking a few steps down the CPU ladder so you can max out the graphics card budget.
 
A quad core is enough for gaming at the moment IMO (And some games will be fine on a dual core).

Bear in mind that 90% of games are also released on consoles, which have no more than 3 real cores. The extra eye candy and detail in PC versions is all about the GPU.

My advice would be to get a 4 core i5 or i7 rig with a good overclock (eg 4GHz). You won't find a 6 cores system beating it in many games (if any).
 
Last edited:
Could a 950 core or 960 be overclocked to 4.00 ghz?

And yes the 980 x is a truly huge processor but is it overkill for gaming, would it benefit my gaming? Im an older gamer (mid 30s now) and do like my pc gaming, I just want to get it right.

Ill let my kids console there way through school!
 
Neither a £750 i7 980, nor a £220 i7 930 will beat a £140 i5 750 by very much at all, if anything, in games now, or in the foreseeable near future. If you have a limitless budget you might consider paying for the more expensive CPUs, but it's seriously diminishing returns. If the choice would mean compromising GPU, it's a bad choice. If you're on any kind of 'normal' budget and/or performance-per-pound is important to you, stick with i5 760 and spend more on GPU (2x 6870 for example), SSD, big Monitor, keyb/mouse etc etc. The result will be a much better gaming rig. Also bear in mind the new Sandy Bridge Intel stuff is just round the corner, and even if they dont turn out to be the best choice in their own right, they may push prices of current stuff down a little. Worth waiting to see what the story is when the dust settles if you can.
 
Budget isnt any issue, I have my wifes permission to spend lol I just dont want to go overboard for the sake of it. Ive seen the 5870's cards and pretty sure im going with that, its just the cpu, I dont want to mad if I dont need to. I guess waiting for Sandy Bridge would be wise but I have no patience lol
 
at the end of the day, if you buy what you think is an overpowerful CPU (No such thing imo) your probably doing the best thing if you have the cash to do so,
you will have a system that you will get the maximum usage out of and wont have to upgrade for a long time,

pc components get better and better every week and it is very hard to stay ontop of all the latest tech
whats good now wont be as good in a couple of months, but that doesn't mean your system is any less powerful,

basicly the more you spend, the longer you'll go without having to upgrade
 
markyzola said:
Could a 950 core or 960 be overclocked to 4.00 ghz?

And yes the 980 x is a truly huge processor but is it overkill for gaming, would it benefit my gaming? Im an older gamer (mid 30s now) and do like my pc gaming, I just want to get it right.

Ill let my kids console there way through school!
Click to expand...

All quad core Nehalems will clock to the same speed (give or take 200MHz), whether you spend £190 on the CPU or £800.

Frequency is still king in gaming performance (when you are not GPU limited), so A 4GHz Quad is going to be a better gaming CPU than a 3GHz 6 core.

The 6 core CPUs will also clock to ~4GHz as well, but they are far too pricey for me.

I bought a pre-overclocked i7 920 bundle (4GHz) from here over a year ago, and it is still impressively fast. I spent lots of money on SSDs and SLI GPUs rather than on a 6 core CPU because they make a much bigger difference to all round performance.
 
HazardO said:
All quad core Nehalems will clock to the same speed (give or take 200MHz), whether you spend £190 on the CPU or £800.

Frequency is still king in gaming performance (when you are not GPU limited), so A 4GHz Quad is going to be a better gaming CPU than a 3GHz 6 core.

The 6 core CPUs will also clock to ~4GHz as well, but they are far too pricey for me.

I bought a pre-overclocked i7 920 bundle (4GHz) from here over a year ago, and it is still impressively fast. I spent lots of money on SSDs and SLI GPUs rather than on a 6 core CPU because they make a much bigger difference to all round performance.
Click to expand...


Is yours a gaming rig?
 
The point about the i7 bloomfield (i7 930/950) and i7 gulftown (i7 970/980X) is that in lightly threaded applications (like games) they are basically no faster than a £140 i5 760. This is because they are all built with the same architecture therefore are core-for-core, clock-for-clock pretty much the same. The big diffence comes in when you start using heavily multithreaded applcations (not games) - in these cases the hyperthreading of all the i7s helps to produce a performance benefit of up to 25%, and with the Gulftown chips these have 50% more cores - so they can have up to an extra 50% performance boost on top of this.

Therefore, if you are running some highly multihreaded applications (like rendering) then these i7s can provide a solid performance advatage that justifies the extra cost. However, in lightly threaded applications these gains are just not there - hence why we recommend an i5 if you plan on gaming.

Also, please bear in mind that the new Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPUs are coming in early January. These are the next generation chips based on a new architecture, but will replace the existing s1156 i3, i5 and i7 CPUs and cost about the same. These chips will be faster clock-for-clock than the existing ones and are clocked faster at stock - so in CPU heavy, lightly threaded applications (like some games, eg. BF:BC2, ARMA2, Civ 5, GTA 4 ) these will provide a performance boost.

Also, please don't buy a new 5870 now, the next generation AMD GPUs that replace the 5800 family are arriving in the week of December 13th.
 
markyzola said:
Ok im naive, GPU is graphics cards right? And how much RAM is good, ive have 6gb at the mo (800 mhz) my current rig is nearly 4 years old though.
Click to expand...

Yup, GPU is graphics card. You may want to have a look at this thread I made which has the definitions for a lot of the technical jargon we speak, hopefully it will help clear things up :)

As for RAM, with these dual channel systems 4GB DDR3 1600MHz is pretty standard - but with the lower price of RAM and the appearance of many high density RAM sticks it may be worth going for a 2x4GB DDR3 kit (8GB), at least if you aggree with the assessment in this article.
 
markyzola said:
Ok im naive, GPU is graphics cards right? And how much RAM is good, ive have 6gb at the mo (800 mhz) my current rig is nearly 4 years old though.
Click to expand...

I'd be looking for at least 4G of RAM. My i7 920 uses a x58 chipset which supports tripple channel RAM, so I have 3 2G sticks, 6G in total. (Note to use more than 4G of RAM you need a 64bit OS, and for reasons I'm not going to go into here, typically 32bit windows can only use ~3G of RAM). The P55 i5s have dual channel controllers, and so 4 or 8G is a sensible configuration for them. You will not notice the difference between dual and triple channel memory in games.

Games are still only 32bit (well 99% of them anyway). 32bit apps on windows can only use upto 2G of RAM (Unless patched when they can use upto 3G).

However most people like to be able to task switch between applications without swapping, hence I recommend 4G+ and 64bit win7 (Home premium is good enough).
 
Last edited:
+1 more no to 5870. Not at the price it's currently stuck at which is pretty much a hangover from when it was top dog. 6870 is a much better bet right now - just not quite as powerful as a 5870, but due to better x-fire scaling, 2x 6870 equals the performance of 2x 5870! Better to wait a few more weeks for 69xx though to see what they bring to the table.

4GB is enough for any gaming rig at the moment. Most of your current 6GB is twiddling it's thumbs :).

oO Stevie Oo said:
basicly the more you spend, the longer you'll go without having to upgrade
Click to expand...

Sorry but that's really not generally true. You have to do your homework properly and not just assume higher model numbers and higher cost = better. Anyone who buys an i7 975, for example, has pretty much flushed £500 down the toilet, as what they've just bought is no better, and wont last any longer than an i7 930.
 
Last edited:
I've read that the Sandy Bridge CPUs won't overclock due to the architecture. If this is so, it seems while they might be 10-20% faster than the current equivalent CPU at stock, will they perform worse than a healthily overclocked CPU from the current generation??
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom