i3 + high end graphics card?

[SteveGrabowski]

I was reading this review where they tested Pentium/i3/i5/i7 gaming performance when paired with a GTX 780 Ti. For the most part, the 3.7 GHz i3-4360 held it's own very well.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Do these results seem inconsistent with peoples' results gaming with i3's? Because it seems like the only large bottleneck we see here is in Crysis 3, where an i5 is hugely better than an i3 and an i7 is significantly better than an i5. But otherwise the i3-4360 doesn't seem to be bottlenecking a GTX 780 Ti.

Wouldn't it stand to reason that the best advice for gamers on a budget to get the most bang for their buck would be to buy a highly clocked i3 and then the best graphics card they can afford? But I almost never see this recommended online. Usually people recommend settling a bit on the GPU to be able to buy a Haswell Refresh i5.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I wonder how well these results hold up in games released this year though. But what those results above tell me is that most games up to last year have one or two threads doing the bulk of the work and that third and fourth threads are pretty light computationally, and thus can be handled great by the 30% of a core that HT is supposed to provide.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

A bit of a bottleneck on BF4 too on i3 vs i5, though it looks like a meaningless one if you're running a 60 Hz monitor. I imagine this is probably more of an issue in MP though.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Problem is they picked the highest end i3 which is rather pricy and then clocked all the other i5s at the same clock speed. A pretty artificial situation. I would have preferred to see a lower end (cheaper) i3 compared to a low end i5, a 4690k and a 4790k at stock speeds.

It seems false economy to drop several hundred dollars on a gpu and a thousand or more on an entire system and cheap out and try to save a hundred or so at most on the CPU. So I would go for at least a 4690k with a high end gpu, and reserve an i3 for a low/mid range system. In fact, going for an i5 in a high end system seems obvious, and the more relevant question is whether it is worth it to go for an i7 or HT Xeon.

 

[crashtech]

Most of the participants here really push quad cores, and it's true that they are the safest choice. Like the AMD crowd, they make the argument that there is no substitute for those extra cores. I tend to mostly agree, unless budget considerations force a different decision. In a "general use" machine that sees only some gaming, a fast i3 may even provide a better experience than a slow i5 overall per dollar. But that is getting to be a harder case to make with newer games.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Problem is they picked the highest end i3 which is rather pricy and then clocked all the other i5s at the same clock speed. A pretty artificial situation. I would have preferred to see a lower end (cheaper) i3 compared to a low end i5, a 4690k and a 4790k at stock speeds.

It seems false economy to drop several hundred dollars on a gpu and a thousand or more on an entire system and cheap out and try to save a hundred or so at most on the CPU. So I would go for at least a 4690k with a high end gpu, and reserve an i3 for a low/mid range system. In fact, going for an i5 in a high end system seems obvious, and the more relevant question is whether it is worth it to go for an i7 or HT Xeon.

On a budget the $40 difference in price from the 3.7GHz i3-4360 and the 3.7GHz (Turbo) i5-4590 could mean the difference between putting an R9 280 and an R9 290 in one's system, considering the 290's have been going as low as $230 AR while the 280s are usually in the $180-$200 range AR. Based on these results above, it seems like a gamer would get a lot more out of the i3+290 combination than the i5+280 one.

But perhaps another compelling CPU buy would be the 3.6 GHz i3-4160, which can be found for $120. It has only 3MB L3 cache vs the 4MB L3 on the 4360, so it would definitely take some more research to see how it stacks up to the i5's for $80 less now.

It seems like someone on a budget who wants to play games using the CryTEK engine, like Crysis 3 and Star Citizen, would definitely be better off buying the true quad core i5 instead of a simulated quad core i3. But for someone less concerned with budget and wanting to play those games, the i7s and Xeons seem like pretty compelling buys over the i5.

As for the i5-K series, you're talking a lot of extra cost with the motherboard and cooling, not to mention the premium you pay for that unlocked multiplier. It's at least enough extra cost that locked i7's and Xeon's are worth considering instead.

It just kind of looks like i5's aren't the best buys though: it looks like the i3 does a great job approximating an i5 instead of a Pentium most of the time, and when it doesn't, it looks like you'd really want an i7 instead.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Most of the participants here really push quad cores, and it's true that they are the safest choice. Like the AMD crowd, they make the argument that there is no substitute for those extra cores. I tend to mostly agree, unless budget considerations force a different decision. In a "general use" machine that sees only some gaming, a fast i3 may even provide a better experience than a slow i5 overall per dollar. But that is getting to be a harder case to make with newer games.

Which games are you referring to that make an i3 seem like a low value for your money buy versus an i5? Is there any reason to think Crysis 3 becomes the norm, where you have great scaling to quadcores and hexacores? Is this something we're likely to see any time soon considering how many years go into developing a game engine? Or is this something we're likely to see at the end of the PS4/XBox One era, when both the Haswell i3 and Haswell i5 will be obsolete?

 

[frozentundra123456]

I still disagree for a high end system. You could even drop down to a 4690 non-K and not have to get an expensive motherboard or aftermarket cooler. If it costs 80 dollars more and the system lasts for 3 years, that is only about 25.00 per year. Even further, if more demanding games come out, it is much easier to adjust to a gpu limitation by lowering a few settings, while if you get microstutter or other cpu limitations, it is much harder to find a setting to alleviate those. And gpus are advancing much faster than cpus, so a gpu upgrade may be necessary anyway.

In any case, you are now introducing a new argument, because the thread started with the assumption of getting a high end graphics card.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

It kind of makes you think recommendations should be:

Case 1: Single player budget gamer
Buy an i3 for $120-$160 and the best GPU you can get with the rest of the money

Case 2: Multiplayer budget gamer
Buy an i5 for $200-$240 and spend the rest on the GPU

Case 3: PC Master Race gamer
Buy an i7 and a badass GPU

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I still disagree for a high end system. You could even drop down to a 4690 non-K and not have to get an expensive motherboard or aftermarket cooler. If it costs 80 dollars more and the system lasts for 3 years, that is only about 25.00 per year. Even further, if more demanding games come out, it is much easier to adjust to a gpu limitation by lowering a few settings, while if you get microstutter or other cpu limitations, it is much harder to find a setting to alleviate those.

True. For example, resolution will have an enormous impact for GPU performance, but pretty negligible for CPU. Like I have seen with the GTX 750 Ti, which really struggles in BF4 Ultra at 1080p but is amazing dropping down to 1600x900 Ultra. I guess for CPU performance you'd really need to dial physics down, if available. Otherwise, you're kind of screwed. I guess it just depends on whether you believe developers will be able to make their games scale well to four cores. For right now it doesn't appear so and this brings up the whole future proofing argument for a very uncertain future, considering how much more difficult it is to parallelize games, which are already about the most complicated software written.

And gpus are advancing much faster than cpus, so a gpu upgrade may be necessary anyway.

Very true. Maybe higher end GPU's and budget builds don't make a lot of sense together given that.

In any case, you are now introducing a new argument, because the thread started with the assumption of getting a high end graphics card.

Yeah, you're right. I guess I should have titled this thread something more about bottleneck potential than being explicitly about the highest end GPUs with an i3.

 

[Spungo]

I was reading this review where they tested Pentium/i3/i5/i7 gaming performance when paired with a GTX 780 Ti. For the most part, the 3.7 GHz i3-4360 held it's own very well.

This is the most accurate benchmark of the ones you posted.

It's a shame that sites no longer do proper benchmarking.
Here's how it's supposed to be done:

GPU Testing:
Build a machine with the fastest CPU available. Set the game to the highest resolution with the highest settings. Run the test.

CPU Testing:
Build a machine with the fastest GPU available. Set the game to the lowest resolution and lowest settings. Run the test. This ensures absolutely no GPU bottleneck is happening. This is why tests with chips like the Pentium 4 would show 300+ frames per second in Quake 3. A new chip might get 330 frames instead of 300 frames per second. That was an accurate comparison of real performance and future proofing.

Today, we get these garbage benchmarks that are virtually meaningless. People run the CPU test at 4k resolution with the highest settings and conclude that a $50 CPU is the same as a $300 CPU because all of the chips got roughly 50fps. They completely ignore the fact that the poorly designed test was actually testing the GPU, and all of the results were the same because it was the same GPU used in every test. 2 years from now, the people who bought an i3 will be scratching their heads and wondering why they can't play games released in 2016 but the guys with an i7 can.

 

[crashtech]

I don't find starting out with a lower-end CPU in a build problematic, as long as attention is paid to ensure the motherboard has enough features to make a CPU upgrade feasible. It's the motherboard that is more of a pain to swap out, not the CPU. Since Intel CPUs maintain a reasonable resale value, a later CPU upgrade is not a bad way to get playable framerates and great image quality today, since it will free up money for other parts of the system.

This has been argued over and over on this forum, and while a later CPU upgrade might not be the very best use of money, it does allow users to get more for their money right now, and if the downside is acknowledged (two CPUs cost more than one, even if the old one is sold), it's not the worst way to go.

 

[AtenRa]

2 years from now, the people who bought an i3 will be scratching their heads and wondering why they can't play games released in 2016 but the guys with an i7 can.

There is not a single game a 3 year old SandyBridge Core i3 cannot play at adequate frame rates today or in 2015 games. If you want to play games and you are on a budget, invest more in the GPU.
A quad core FX 4100 + GTX970 will be better for current SP games than Core i5 + GTX750Ti.
You only need high CPU performance for Multiplayer gaming. That is the only reason to invest more in the CPU and the rest of the budget to what ever GPU you can get.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

This is the most accurate benchmark of the ones you posted.

It's a shame that sites no longer do proper benchmarking.
Here's how it's supposed to be done:

GPU Testing:
Build a machine with the fastest CPU available. Set the game to the highest resolution with the highest settings. Run the test.

CPU Testing:
Build a machine with the fastest GPU available. Set the game to the lowest resolution and lowest settings. Run the test. This ensures absolutely no GPU bottleneck is happening. This is why tests with chips like the Pentium 4 would show 300+ frames per second in Quake 3. A new chip might get 330 frames instead of 300 frames per second. That was an accurate comparison of real performance and future proofing.

Today, we get these garbage benchmarks that are virtually meaningless. People run the CPU test at 4k resolution with the highest settings and conclude that a $50 CPU is the same as a $300 CPU because all of the chips got roughly 50fps. They completely ignore the fact that the poorly designed test was actually testing the GPU, and all of the results were the same because it was the same GPU used in every test. 2 years from now, the people who bought an i3 will be scratching their heads and wondering why they can't play games released in 2016 but the guys with an i7 can.

I disagree. That benchmark tested how badly Pentiums, i3s, and i5s bottleneck a high end GPU. It's pretty valuable to see whether a given CPU is overkill for its intended usage and how strong the diminishing returns are with price. There is only one real scenario where an i3 will become a bad bottleneck by 2016: when games become parallelized to the point of needing 3+ main threads of roughly equivalent computational complexity. We have been waiting for that since the time of Kentsfield and the 7 core PS3 and it's still not here. You have to wonder if it's so complicated to program that CryTEK could still be the only engine to need 4 strong cores by 2016. The struggles of the Pentium show the dual core era is over, but I wonder how long the 30% virtual cores offered by HT will allow the i3 to remain viable. It seems like it's a struggle to partition such complicated software into 4 threads doing roughly equal amounts of work.

 

[Deders]

Good to know my current rig beats stock haswell i5's and in one case (Tomb raider) i7's

 

[SPBHM]

There is not a single game a 3 year old SandyBridge Core i3 cannot play at adequate frame rates today or in 2015 games. If you want to play games and you are on a budget, invest more in the GPU.
A quad core FX 4100 + GTX970 will be better for current SP games than Core i5 + GTX750Ti.
You only need high CPU performance for Multiplayer gaming. That is the only reason to invest more in the CPU and the rest of the budget to what ever GPU you can get.

my i3 2100 can't handle well enough quite a few single player games, but looking at stuff like this

having an AMD graphics card is probably one big factor

 

[crashtech]

Didn't realize the penalty could be that bad with an AMD GPU. Is that test with or without Mantle?

This could explain why my nephew's G3258 did so well with my old GTX 770. I was amazed at the performance even in MP.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

my i3 2100 can't handle well enough quite a few single player games, but looking at stuff like this

having an AMD graphics card is probably one big factor

Wow, what's the story there? Looks like a Eurogamer.net review, but I can't seem to find it. That result with an i3 looks pretty awful.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Oh okay, I found the review that screenshot is from: COD Advanced Warfare on Eurogamer.net. According to them AMD cards at the R9 270 level and above don't play nice with i3s, though the GTX 760 gets spectacular results:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-face-off

However, we can report that we see the same issue to different degrees on other AMD GPUs too, though the lower down the stack you go, the less noticeable the impact (as you're hitting GPU, rather than CPU limitations) - as we saw when testing with an R7 265, essentially an overclocked version of the classic Radeon HD 7850. Generally speaking though, if you're running anything at the R9 270 level or better, we'd recommend an Intel quad-core processor or the equivalent for best performance with an AMD card, while a Core i3 is potent enough to deal with Nvidia equivalents in this performance range.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Well, so much for that idea if the better AMD cards have to be eliminated.

 

[escrow4]

Its 2015 not 2006. Quad core is mandatory if you want all the new games coming out to play at a solid minimum FPS - which few sites test. You don't want FPS bouncing between 30 and 50+ and an i3 will dip. You will feel the difference. Far Cry 4, Dragon Age Inquisition and AC: Unity all have real quads for minimums and recommended.

 

[schmuckley]

tbh,I'd rather have a 4.6 with 2600-ish RAM Pentium g3258 for a budget gaming build.
clock speed+IPC>Hyperthreading.
..and my 7950 gets 10fps more on avg than a gtx 770.

 

[Lepton87]

Why buy i3 along with a high-end card if going for an i5 makes such a small difference to the total cost of the computer? If you take into account everything like monitor, speakers etc. it makes almost no difference in cost at all, why suffer with an i3 if so little money gets you so much better CPU in most cases.

 

[Kallogan]

i would not go dual core with console games to be heavily multithreaded (8 cores on ps4)

That doesn't seem very wise/futureproof