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i3 or i5 gaming min

macgyverfan

macgyverfan

macgyverfan

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Joined
22 Nov 2015
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100
Location
Surrey, UK
macgyverfan said:
I'm building a new gaming rig in the new year and want to know peoples opinions of 2 vs 4 core for gaming.

I'm looking at the i3 6320 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1151-processor-retail-cp-588-in.html

The equivalent i5 (in terms of clock speed) is the i5 6600K https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1151-processor-retail-cp-579-in.html

So the 6320 has hyper-threading so they both have 4 threads. Will I notice a difference in gaming for an extra £80?
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i wouldnt touch a two core, I havent since the golden oldie days of I cant even remember when, lol, I used to be a heavy gamer, I dont think I could even imagine serious gaming on an old 2 core rig, well unless it had a right good graphics card and loads of ram maybe then that might be a bit different (maybe).

I would always go for the model numbers that end in a "K" letter if it was me, that way they are unlocked and if you need to tweak them even just slightly you can, might be a bit more expensive but that bit more expense is sometimes well worth it.

On the other hand my mrs has a system with an i3 (two core) cpu and mannnnnn, to me its as slow as a week in the jail, lol, honestly, but thats just me, just my opinion, maybe a better graphics card and more ram would be better options for you, its hard to say without a lot more spec details.
 
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well unless it had a right good graphics card and loads of ram maybe then that might be a bit different (maybe).
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Cheers for the reply. I have a GTX 970 and 8GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM. My old CPU was an AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE which clocks in at 3.2GHz. Pretty good gaming experience even with new games.

I figured the hyper-threading and high clock speed may be enough for what I need. May need to think more about a 4 core.
 
Also now asking whether 8GB of RAM is sufficient for my needs. Which are pretty much only gaming.

It looks like the i3 6320 or i3 Skylakes generally won an OC3D - Gold award.

"So if gaming is the main area of use for your home computer, with some light every day tasks mixed in, you'd be foolish to spend more than you have to just so that the specifications read better than the actual results. These Intel Core i3s are both brilliant processors with plenty of performance at an affordable price."
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https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1151-processor-retail-cp-588-in.html

Maybe i3 is the way to go.
 
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To be honest, the new 2 core Skylake is very very good indeed. I would say they are superb for any gaming!
 
macgyverfan said:
Also now asking whether 8GB of RAM is sufficient for my needs. Which are pretty much only gaming.

It looks like the i3 6320 or i3 Skylakes generally won an OC3D - Gold award.



https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1151-processor-retail-cp-588-in.html

Maybe i3 is the way to go.
Click to expand...

No to an i3. It may look pretty good with the old/current generation of games but we are in the process of entering a new era and the use of multiple cpu cores is going to be one of the big changes. With future games I think the results will be very different.

I an currently on 8 gb's of ram and while it is okay right now I need to move up to 16 as I'm already touching the limit at times in games.
I've been trying to put buying the extra ram off for a while because if I buy now it's ddr3 yet I plan on being on ddr4 next year so it would be waste of money so if you are doing a build now definitely go with 16 gb's. Also try and upgrade to a ddr4 build so you have the ddr4 ram to move to future builds in a few years time. (Just realised you are going DDR4 so that's great, do go 16 though)
 
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So it looks like the i3 can handle it at the moment but moving into the future the i5 would be a better bet. I guess it's only an £80 upgrade
 
Yeah but is there any point of spending ~£130 now (i3 6320) and then spending ~£210 (i5 6600K) later to upgrade? May as well bite the bullet now.

I remember some people talking about DX12 reducing the need for more CPU horsepower. Thoughts?
 
This is the first I3 I have seen from Intel that I would take over the AMD FX 6350 tbh. Up until this one the FX still had the better threaded performance. It may still do tbh, but these I3s are making it pretty much impossible to recommend AMD.

Either AMD need to drop the price or the time could finally come where they stop selling CPUs all together..

Any way enough of that.

OP. I would say for a single GPU the I3 you chose would be more than good enough. However, you really need to think about the future. The only thing that has always put me off of any I3 since the Clarkdale days is the locked clocks. They are usually much lower than the I5s and usually pretty tame.

So I would maybe look at the I5 4690k (if that's what it's called) and maybe spec up a few different options that are overclockable before you order.

I had a locked I5 a few years ago (a Xeon specced the same as the I5 2400) and I found the sub 4ghz clocks very frustrating. Obviously it was OK when I got it, but when I wanted to give it a performance shove for Crysis 3 I found I couldn't and due to the cacky clock speed the minimum FPS were terrible.

Also, some have raised a good point about cores. I am finding that very very slowly games are taking advantage of more cores. I bought one of those Pentium Anniversary things a little while back and even with a good overclock it still stuttered very badly in GTAV.

Any way, TL;DR. Sorry about waffling on there.
 
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