Poll - How much CPU power do you really need?

[Hulk]

We have people in this forum who build systems that last for years and years. And we have other people who will upgrade to the fastest option as soon as it comes out. But how much CPU power do you really need, right now, today?

The poll questions are based on if you had the fastest consumer desktop CPU available today, the 3770K. I'm not counting the hex cores as I don't consider them mainstream.

And how does that differ from 10 years ago?


I primarily use the following applications.
MS Office
Quickbooks
Coreldraw X5
Photoshop Elements
Vegas Pro 10
Presonus Studio One 2
Ripbot
Microsoft Expression

Out of all of these apps I can say that the only one I could really use more compute is Sony Vegas Pro 10. In this case it's not the render so much as the increase in real-time preview performance that would be nice.

Faster renders are always welcome but I can always set them up to be accomplished over night.

Now if we go back in time 10 years then I needed more compute for CorelDraw X5, (extrusions and other fx were slow), Photoshop Elements (again applications of fx, especially noise reduction was painful), Presonus Studio One 2 (again compute limited on number of fx during playback), and all renders were terribly slow even with SD streams.

 

[Exophase]

I don't think I'm much of a power user but there are some times here and there where I can appreciate having a lot of CPU power at my disposal. Like with compiling.. sure lots of cores are great here too, but I'm not always rebuilding the whole thing and even when I am a couple of heavy modules tend to dominate compile time. And sometimes I'm trying to test some algorithm over a big set of data and it helps to have more power to get it done faster.

I don't do recent console emulation much anymore but if I did I'd probably appreciate a lot of CPU power. I did try a game in Dolphin a while ago and I came up wanting with my i5-2500K, even when pushed to 4.5GHz.

Despite this, I've always been in the upgrade every few years camp - in fact I usually tended to not do it until something broke down. Maybe it would have been worth chasing upgrades back then when I didn't have the money but these days the improvements aren't good enough to go for very often.

 

[Ken g6]

I'm good for the most part, but DC apps can always use more. :twisted:

Actually for most apps my old Q9400 is more RAM limited at 4GB. :hmm:

 

[Homeles]

I put up with a Phenom X4 9750 for 3 years. CPU performance doesn't really matter to me, although when I do make the eventual upgrade to Haswell, I expect to be blown away.

I play a few 3D games, but none of them are particularly intensive. Web browsing and document creation is about the extent of what I do right now, but as I get further into my major, I'm going to need some muscle.

 

[boxleitnerb]

I would like to have a CPU that is at least twice as fast (singlethreaded!) as my SB-E@4200. Given the sad fact that many games are poorly optimized and that even such a CPU cannot maintain 60fps everywhere, much more horsepower would be indeed welcome. I have given up on the developers to get their shit together, so it's the CPU-makers I'm looking at.

 

[Hulk]

I would like to have a CPU that is at least twice as fast (singlethreaded!) as my SB-E@4200. Given the sad fact that many games are poorly optimized and that even such a CPU cannot maintain 60fps everywhere, much more horsepower would be indeed welcome. I have given up on the developers to get their shit together, so it's the CPU-makers I'm looking at.

The 100% performance increase from whatever you have was always my upgrade paradigm as well. Unfortunately I think it only happened twice for me.
Pentium 90 > Celeron 300A overlock to 450 - This was a big one.

Pentium 4 3.06 to C2D E6400 o/c to 3.2GHz - Another huge one

But moving from Sandy right now, IPC-wise all you're going to get on average with Haswell will probably be about 10% improvement per clock cycle. Sure there might be some code with new instructions that might to 30% better but I'd say 10% on legacy code. The rest would have to come from clockspeed increases. And we both know that ain't happening anytime soon (unfortunately).

 

[Idontcare]

For personal home-use stuff, the occasional encode of a video and so on, I've got plenty of CPU horsepower here.

But the work stuff is compute-bound. More is better and I will upgrade every 2-3yrs for it.

 

[jimbob200521]

I've got a C2Q Q6600 @ 3.6ghz with 4gb of DDR2 and it does everything I want and then some (I'm not a heavy gamer) and all I really want for is more RAM. That being said, I just put together an i7 920 system with 6gb of RAM and am eagerly awaiting seeing 8 virtual cores in Task Manager and seeing how high I can get the i7 920 for my occasional romp into Just Cause 2 and video encode.

 

[frozentundra123456]

The only thing I do that is cpu intensive is gaming, and since I only have a HD7770, my low end i5 is more than enough. Depends on how you define "need" I guess. For purposes of a job, you probably need as much cpu power as you can get.

For personal use, do you really "need" a cpu that can drive a GTX690 or that can encode a DVD in a few minutes quicker than a less powerful one? I dont know, but it is sure nice to have. Even though I dont need it, I would still like to have a 3770, and anyone that can afford it and wishes to get more cpu performance than they "need", more power to them.

One thing I like about computers is that you can pretty much get a top end system for not a lot of money, relative to say a fancy car or house.

 

[Charlie98]

For personal home-use stuff, the occasional encode of a video and so on, I've got plenty of CPU horsepower here.

^^^ That's me. It was a big jump from my old Pentium D Dell to the 2500K, but nothing I really do besides video encoding uses any horsepower. I would probably upgrade my GPU before making the CPU/mobo upgrade.

 

[mikeymikec]

If I wasn't doing any gaming I could probably get by with an Athlon II X2. As it is, I have a PhII X6.

 

[gipper53]

My home PC is plenty of horsepower for my photoshop use (i3770, 2x8gb, 240gb SSD). I might add a dedicated video card, but for now the HD 4000 is doing just fine.

At work, we run Autodesk Revit and 3D Studio Max for large architectural projects. For these programs you can NEVER have enough computing power. Our firm just upgraded to Boxx 4920 Extreme workstations (i3970x @ 4.5ghz, 32gb, Quadro 4000, RAID 1 SSD). While it's nearly impossible to buy or build a faster Revit workstation, you still spend alot of time waiting. On big projects opening a view can still take 8-10 seconds before you can work, and you open a lot of views during a workday. Renderings in 3Ds Max went from 20 minutes to 6, but that's still 6 minutes when you can do nothing else but wait.

 

[Phynaz]

When I can encode 40 hours of video down to a BRD in a minute then maybe I'll be satisfied with the amount of computer power I have available.

 

[videogames101]

I/O or compute bound depending on the app

i doubt this will change for many years

 

[Idontcare]

When I can encode 40 hours of video down to a BRD in a minute then maybe I'll be satisfied with the amount of computer power I have available.

Since encoding is considered to be one of those "emberassingly parallel" type apps, I wonder (back-of-envelope type questions) what it would take in terms of cores and clockspeed to accomplish that kind of encoding rate with today's available cores.

Would that be on the order of 100 IvyBridge cores at 3.5GHz? More?

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

At work, never enough (digital sims and place-and-route make the Peter North of CPUs look like they have a 1" pecker).

At home, I really can't justify upgrading my 4yo i7 920 D0 @4GHz, but Gods be good, I'll do it anyway!

 

[taisingera]

I have had an i3 530 stock and 4GB RAM for almost 3 years now. It is fast enough for what I need. I don't play any games and at most I watch 1080p videos, so Intel HD graphics are even good for me. I am short on funds, but would like to get an SSD.

 

[Jaskalas]

My 2.4 GHz Q6600 is CPU limited playing WoW, of all things. I'd very much like to have much more computing power.

 

[jaqie]

My 2.4 GHz Q6600 is CPU limited playing WoW, of all things. I'd very much like to have much more computing power.

You should see if your motherboard can handle 1333 FSB. if it can, that is the easiest overclock ever, IMO. Just clock it up, and compensate for the new ram timings by lowing the ram timings. Done. A lot more performance.


On the original topic, I am really limited income, I have a thuban x6 @ 3.4GHz. I don't clock it higher because of power limitations of my room, having an AC unit and microwave in here means I gotta watch watts like a hawk. If I could I would have a dual CPU workstation motherboard simply because when I have an extremely compute intensive thing running I want it done ASAP nomatter how big it is. 7zip extreme compressing 100gb of files? too slow even using all 6 cores of my system. transcoding video in batches? too slow. I could always use more CPU power.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I've got a C2Q Q6600 @ 3.6ghz with 4gb of DDR2 and it does everything I want and then some (I'm not a heavy gamer) and all I really want for is more RAM. That being said, I just put together an i7 920 system with 6gb of RAM and am eagerly awaiting seeing 8 virtual cores in Task Manager and seeing how high I can get the i7 920 for my occasional romp into Just Cause 2 and video encode.

You got that chip stable at 3.6? Wowza!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Since encoding is considered to be one of those "emberassingly parallel" type apps, I wonder (back-of-envelope type questions) what it would take in terms of cores and clockspeed to accomplish that kind of encoding rate with today's available cores.

Would that be on the order of 100 IvyBridge cores at 3.5GHz? More?

I've used CUDA-based encode apps, but was never able to exceed about 50% GPU load on a GTS250. Dunno if the encode only used part of the stream processor, or if I was I/O limited.

 

[Hulk]

Since encoding is considered to be one of those "emberassingly parallel" type apps, I wonder (back-of-envelope type questions) what it would take in terms of cores and clockspeed to accomplish that kind of encoding rate with today's available cores.

Would that be on the order of 100 IvyBridge cores at 3.5GHz? More?

Let's do some quick and dirty estimating.

40 hours at 24fps is 3,456,000 frames

A 3770K does 155.4fps for 1st and 2nd pass combined for H.264, or 77.7fps if you look at it as one-pass start-to-finish. That's 19.425fps/core.

To get that done is 60 seconds the frame rate would be 57,600fps.

So that's 2965 Ivy Cores.
Or 741 actual processors.

Of course if you used hex cores and overclocked 20% you'd "only" need about 400 cores.

Also I'm basing this off a pretty darn high quality encode.

Setting a more realistic bar I think would be to compress a two hour movie in one minute. That would require 37 stock 3770K's.

Now let's assume Haswell can do 10% better IPC for video and we could get a octo core part with a 10% higher clock.
Only 15 of these hypothetical Haswell parts.

Sadly we are quite far from crazy fast encoding.

 

[Madpacket]

Intel's Quicksync is a nice option for video encoding but for me realistically outside of BF3 64 player gaming, excess CPU speed is unnecessary at this time.

I can't tell the difference between my 5800K and my 3570K with 99% of the tasks I regularly perform (web surfing, media playback, gaming, etc).

 

[lakedude]

None really. Even a i7-3770k is overkill for surfing and playing videos. The i7 is enough for most of today's games as well.

I do BOINC DC projects so more would be better there.

Video encoding could be faster but that is hardly important.

 

[ShadowVVL]

I voted I'm good for the most part, but a few apps could use more.