Gamers - quad core/hex core dilemma

[rtsurfer]

So you'd take a 4.77MHz quad-core with 1% greater IPC than an i3 over a 3.7GHz i3?

Huh.
This is getting annoying.

My discussion is solely related to this thread. Op asked whether people are interested buying a 4970K or a 5820K or whatever the Haswell Hex core is going to be.

I got into an argument with pandemonium when he said that even dual cores are enough to run today's games.

You jumped in between and are pointing out obscure examples between CPU generation.

Let me finalize this for you in words hopefully you can understand.

I will take a 4670k over any i3 out there, today.
Not the i3 of 10 years later as you like to compare without any sense of CPU generation.

Unless you have something to say about the 4670K & i3. Please don't post an waste my time.

I will ignore you.
I started this discussion somewhere & you took it somewhere else.

I'm saying it's a large factor to consider. Threading is affected by many factors, the amount of cores isn't the end-all of it. So your example of a dual core being much lesser in results in gaming isn't solely because of it being only 2 cores.

Do you have data for proof or just theories. ?

Theories are useless without proof, no matter how obvious they might seem.

 

[pandemonium]

Do you have data for proof or just theories. ?

Theories are useless without proof, no matter how obvious they might seem.

Troll or incredibly naive?

I got into an argument with pandemonium when he said that even dual cores are enough to run today's games.

I never said this. You're removing context.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Op asked whether people are interested buying a 4970K or a 5820K or whatever the Haswell Hex core is going to be.

No he didn't.

 

[rtsurfer]

Troll or incredibly naive?

How am I naive just because I asked you to prove something you said.

I never said this. You're removing context.

It was yesterday night, but I was close.
You said the games are dual threaded, but people should get a Quad to run it.

Currently, Quad is all you need for gaming. Most games won't utilize more than 2 cores, which leaves you 2 additional cores open for peripheral programs to run on.

With the changes to consoles going with more multi-core support in development, this likely will change, but I don't expect that to happen for a few years yet.

The claim of most games being dual threaded was why I started this.

No he didn't.

Yup you are right.
I browse the forum on my phone 90% of the time, so yeah my mistake.
He just has a Quad or Hex Option, no parts specified.

But when I think of buying CPUs, I tend to usually look at current Gen or previous one, not something that came out years ago. But that is just me.

 

[pandemonium]

How am I naive just because I asked you to prove something you said.

Okay... Thought experiment: if all CPUs are equal and the only thing that matters is how many cores they have, then why are there so many options for CPUs that are the same amount of cores?

Why wouldn't everyone just buy the cheapest CPU?

It was yesterday night, but I was close.
You said the games are dual threaded, but people should get a Quad to run it.

You're allowed to quote. By all means, please go back and do so.

Edit: Nicely edited there.

"Utilizing 2 cores" in no way, shape, or form, means "only using 2 threads". Cores aren't threads, btw.

You're clearly arguing about something you have very little understanding of, misinterpreting statements, and removing context. I request you do some reading to better familiarize yourself with the topic prior to making bold statements. I'm sure you won't fulfill that request, so I'll bid you adieu.

 

[seitur]

Anything over big 4 cores is insanely expensive, so there is no question at all.

Hex and Octa is simply too expensive to even consider it.

Ask me this again if ever Hex/Octa big 'Core' cores will be in prices of maximally of current mainstream i5/i7 and 4 Big 'Core' Cores will be at price of current Pentium / i3.

 

[Idontcare]

I'm saying it's a large factor to consider. Threading is affected by many factors, the amount of cores isn't the end-all of it. So your example of a dual core being much lesser in results in gaming isn't solely because of it being only 2 cores.

Huh.
This is getting annoying.
Do you have data for proof or just theories. ?

Theories are useless without proof, no matter how obvious they might seem.

At the risk of "butting in" between the two of you, I will take time to just point out that the ISA (instruction set architecture) contains well north of 1000 instructions in a modern CPU, and each instruction has its own level of IPC (instructions per clock) as well as instruction latency.

It really is virtually impossible to design two different architectures (CPUs) which arrive at the exact same theoretical or realized IPC.

I suppose what I am getting at in a round-about-way is that this argument you two are having is academic at best. Not to denigrate the discussion itself, but just feel like someone needs to point out the obvious here before you two beat each other up over stuff that is either self-evident IMO or irrelevant.

After just seeing Asus take 10 months to fix the z87 RTC bug, I find it difficult to ignore the value in of buying a properly matured platform.

And that is why it takes a solid year, or more, for Intel to VALIDATE and release their XEON lines (from which the extreme series comes) after their mainstream architecture launches.

Anything over big 4 cores is insanely expensive, so there is no question at all.

Hex and Octa is simply too expensive to even consider it.

Ask me this again if ever Hex/Octa big cores will be in prices of maximally of current mainstream i5/i7 and 4 Big Cores will be at price of current Pentium / i3.

What? I don't get this at all. Folks have no qualms over spending $100/month for cable, or $300 + $80/month for a new smartphone every other year.

Is hex or octa cores really "too expensive"? I have my doubts. I think people simply don't see the benefit in such a purchase, so they don't bother.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Anything over big 4 cores is insanely expensive, so there is no question at all.

Hex and Octa is simply too expensive to even consider it.

?
http://www.ncixus.com/products/?usa...pn=FD8320FRHKBOX&manufacture=AMD&promoid=1068

 

[frozentundra123456]

Well that "8 core" can be beaten in a lot of games by a hyperthreaded dual core from intel, and pretty much loses or ties in every gaming test to an intel quad.

 

[cytg111]

Im eyeballing the octo core for sure .. But I will want to see desktop skylake before making any decisions .. so when skylake hits haswell-e will be ~6months old and most of the unknowns will be knowns. Yup, like that strategy.

Wonder if disabling HT on the octo will be beneficial in ~99.2% of situations.

 

[cytg111]

Well that "8 core" can be beaten in a lot of games by a hyperthreaded dual core from intel, and pretty much loses or ties in every gaming test to an intel quad.

At stock.. but OC'ability should be around devils canyon level shouldnt it (a bit lower given the lesser common denominator in 8 cores vs 4 cores)? Of course you'd need cooling to handle the extra watts

 

[RussianSensation]

I wish LGA 2011 chipset had been refreshed for IB-E. I don't want to get burned for early adoption again, so if I wait for Haswell-E, if it's a September release I'll need to wait at least until Christmas to ensure the platform doesn't have any major chipset bugs (like SB recall), and to get at least a couple of BIOS revisions.

With this logic you'd need to wait 3-4 months before buying Z97 because you don't trust that any new chipset wouldn't have issues. Fact of the matter is there have been many Intel chipsets that work perfectly fine the day of release. For example my P965, P35, P55 were rock stable weekend of release and I overclocked my E6400 and Q6600 to 3.4 Ghz which is pretty damn good on early bios. My i7 860 went to 3.9 with a small bump in Vcore.

To imply that Intel's chipset always have some early bugs is not in line with reality. Also, despite you not believing that Turbo works on Intel CPUs, if you are not going to be overclocking, then a stock 5820/5830 will have a rather large deficit vs. a stock 4790k wrt to Turbo speed.

Other than P67's bug, I don't remember the last time my board had early bios issues going all the way back to XP1600+ and I had everything from MSI to Asus to Gigabyte boards.

 

[rtsurfer]

Okay... Thought experiment: if all CPUs are equal and the only thing that matters is how many cores they have, then why are there so many options for CPUs that are the same amount of cores?

Why wouldn't everyone just buy the cheapest CPU?

There shouldn't be a large performance disparity when between the same architecture CPU from the same company running similar close to clockspeeds.

You're allowed to quote. By all means, please go back and do so.

Edit: Nicely edited there.

"Utilizing 2 cores" in no way, shape, or form, means "only using 2 threads". Cores aren't threads, btw.

You're clearly arguing about something you have very little understanding of, misinterpreting statements, and removing context. I request you do some reading to better familiarize yourself with the topic prior to making bold statements. I'm sure you won't fulfill that request, so I'll bid you adieu.

This whole edit is just for show.

Now if you go back and look I posted my comment at 6:28 AM & my last edit was at 6:34 AM.
I did quote your original post in my comment from start.
Only thing I added was this

The claim of most games being dual threaded was why I started this.

Your comment was posted at 6:45 AM & your last edit was at 7:01 AM.
I was done editing my post 11 Minutes before you replied & the Quote of your original post was there from the start, so I dont see where your are coming from here.??

Who is trolling now.?

Now onto important stuff, I own Tomb Raider, how about I Disable HT on my 4770K, downclock it to 3.1 Ghz & run the in-built game benchmark with 2, 3 & 4 active cores.

We will see if there is a performance difference. Do you consider this Scientific enough, I will only invest my time in doing this if you will accept my results, I will post screen shots.
Please respond.

Edit: Sorry this is a late one.
I am well aware of the difference between cores & threads. I was going to edit my original comment & replace thread with core, but I was just lazy & thought you would know what I meant. Which you did know. I will be be less lazy next time.

 

[Ajay]

Four cores for gaming seems to really be the sweet spot. 6+ cores are for more heavily threaded workloads - or bragging rights.

 

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[moonbogg]

2500k still doing fine, lol. I'm still glad I have a hex since its in the lead (by small amount) despite less ipc than 4770k. Be interesting to see what happens when the game gets really chaotic.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

I went through this dilemma ~5 years ago with the E8200 vs Q8200.

The way I looked at it, more cores the better. Software will catch up in no time. Even though single threaded performance was a bit lower, it was still more than "good enough" to run anything well. It would also greatly increase the longevity of the system by being "good enough"for future gaming.

I mostly play NBA 2K14 and it utilizes three cores. When I set affinity to just two cores the game really stumbles on intense situations. When on all 4? Absolutely smooth gameplay.

 

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[TurtleCrusher]

So you'd take a 4.77MHz quad-core with 1% greater IPC than an i3 over a 3.7GHz i3?

You're being ridiculous right now. Just read your comments a few more times.

 

[SPBHM]

...Although, I can't really figure out what their CPU test was. Is that video supposed to show the extent of their benchmark run? There's barely anything happening. Will the game start putting weight on more cores if there was actually something happening?

looking at the min framerate, it's probably not a good benchmark, or this game requirements for the CPU is a lot lower than many current games, including BF3/BF4

 

[BrightCandle]

Have you guys seen these new benches from the Hardline beta:

http://gamegpu.ru/action-/-fps-/-tps/battlefield-hardline-beta-test-gpu.html

It's kind of hard to stay enthusiastic about hex/octocore procs when the 3970X manages such a puny lead over the 4770k in this 'next gen' title.

...Although, I can't really figure out what their CPU test was. Is that video supposed to show the extent of their benchmark run? There's barely anything happening. Will the game start putting weight on more cores if there was actually something happening?

Its really important to understand that one game doesn't say anything about others. The general data trend on gamegpu.ru is what matters, its all the games and specifically all the games you play. If all you play is BF hardline then the results for that game will be very important, but I would hazard a guess that most people don't play one game. Using a single example simply isn't sufficient to determine the results.

Its for this reason I think my 55 game meta study is more enlightening than any individual result, you can look at the specific examples of games that do benefit and conclude they are or are not games you play but single results are so often uselessly misleading.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Gamegpu.ru data is flawed by design. Since they just reflect the taskmgr output. And that itself is flawed because threads jumps cores.

 

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[ShintaiDK]

Exactly. The current data they post is close to useless. Specially when cores can change speeds as they like.