Poll - How much CPU power do you really need?

[luis_alfredo]

I have an intel dual core E2180 @2.0ghz + 1gb ram 667mhz + GT 520. I really need a new computer

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Outside of the office applications that do here I am also playing some heavy games and haved with some digital encoding work. Am I using all the the performance I have at my figures? No but there are times that I could use a little more power.

 

[Drsignguy]

In my signature are the rigs I have. Using the two 2600k for DC right now and had to shut the others down for a while due to power expenses. But, I always want more power, need more power and will get more power with my next upgrade. Skipping the Ivybridge and waiting on Haswell.

 

[Idontcare]

Outside of the office applications that do here I am also playing some heavy games and haved with some digital encoding work. Am I using all the the performance I have at my figures? No but there are times that I could use a little more power.

Guessing you meant "at my fingers" there? :hmm:

Gives me an odd mental image trying to match performance to a multi-body end-user situation

 

[alcoholbob]

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.

I'm a pretty optimistic guy, but I don't think anyone in this thread will be alive to actually see performance of 3000 current i7 3770ks on a $300 100W TDP chip. That's gotta be over 100 years in the future.

 

[24601]

CPUs bottleneck GPUs like crazy in games, especially games more than 5 months old.

Moar IPC, Moar Clockspeed :O:O:O

 

[Ajay]

I'm a pretty optimistic guy, but I don't think anyone in this thread will be alive to actually see performance of 3000 current i7 3770ks on a $300 100W TDP chip. That's gotta be over 100 years in the future.

Nope. GPU compute will get there much faster. I don't have any numbers readily at hand. We'll see how well Haswell does, dual FMA pipelines per core should speed things up considerably.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I'm a pretty optimistic guy, but I don't think anyone in this thread will be alive to actually see performance of 3000 current i7 3770ks on a $300 100W TDP chip. That's gotta be over 100 years in the future.

Actually, if Intel continues at an improvement rate of 15% a generation and 14 months per generation, that's only 66.84 years from now (log base 1.15 of 3000 times 14 months divided by 12 months per year)!

 

[desura]

I recently got a T60 laptop working.

Centrino Duo 1.86ghz. 1.5gb ram.

For websurfing and text editing, it is *as fast* as my core i5 macbook air.

Probably the only place you'll notice a difference is games (duh) or video/audio encoding.

 

[SlickR12345]

I feel like my CPU is pretty good and wouldn't be overwhelmed for at least good 2 years. Barely few programs use the 4 cores and even then its not 100%.

I have more trouble with the HDD as copying/pasting and virus scanning is limited by the HDD.

 

[TheReaWarmonger]

An Athlon II X4 650 is more than enough CPU power for any workload. I run a Athlon II x3 450 Rana in my main rig, and I barely ever have it running above 50%. The only time I use above 50% is when I am packing archives (.rar) or playing games. Unlike most people, I can wait the extra 5 seconds to complete a number crunching task. As a software programmer, I can say you don't need more than what the industry is offering today. Compute power means nothing to poorly written code. Try riding a bicycle without no chain. Tho things will be taking a huge turn soon with HSAIL.

 

[2is]

I'm 2:20 (H:M) into a Blu-Ray encode so for this particular task, I could certainly use more power. For everything else, I've got more than enough.

 

[loccothan]

Im really satisfied with my RIG (is in my profile) i work in QuarkX, 3DMax and Photoshp CS 2 & 5
also lot of Net Cruising and Gaming (also Crysis 2 & 3 ) nothing to add at the moment !
I'm waiting for Vishera Piledriver rev2 will be around in fall so i'll change my selected x6 1100 (easy bump on 4.2 GHz on Air with FSB 248) with select x8 i'll bump it on 4.8GHz with low v ! ;-)

 

[LxMxFxD4]

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.

an i5-3570k is only $180 on sale and will last 5 years. I've had mine for a year now and it is still top dog.

CPU power is irrelevant in the desktop market. Battlefield 3 played identically on my q9550 as it does on my 3570k (after a few patches, anyway). As for apps, less than 1% of anandtech people video encode or use photoshop. The only reason I upgraded was because DDR3 was cheap and the whole upgrade only cost about $30 after selling the old stuff on ebay.

 

[poofyhairguy]

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.

Dolphin is pushing the entire pile for me. I would love a CPU where all games are smooth.

 

[Deders]

The only game i've actually seen use all 4 of my cores at 100% is Crysis 3,

Spoiler

when you have to hide in the grass from the tower

and even then its 30-45 FPS

Apart from that My rig is coping admirably.

 

[Zeno78]

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.

Not sure were you get those encode speeds.. My i7-3770K stock using Ripbot264 CQ setting of 20 doing Blu-Ray encodes using FLAC as audio and mkv as container I average 28fps If I OC to 4.3 I get maybe 32fps

 

[Zodiark1593]

Moar CPU powah please.

 

[jimhsu]

Yes gaming always can use more (considering most are still poorly threaded and don't efficiently utilize GPU horsepower). But non-gaming things I do that need horsepower include:

- Nonlinear regression modeling for finance and science (my most important current CPU use case, probably)
- Image processing / feature detection / segmentation / reconstruction (very soon, as big datasets start coming in)
- Game modding - the whole pipeline from 3ds max, Photoshop, editor, testing (editor operations are generally very memory/CPU intensive)
- Large scale bioinformatics datasets (not right now, but in the past)
- Video rendering (again, mostly in the past)
- Compiling, now and then

 

[Hulk]

Not sure were you get those encode speeds.. My i7-3770K stock using Ripbot264 CQ setting of 20 doing Blu-Ray encodes using FLAC as audio and mkv as container I average 28fps If I OC to 4.3 I get maybe 32fps

Old post but I think I was basing on sd video not hd.

 

[Gillbot]

MOAR! Hard to Facebook and Freecell on a 3930k.....

 

[cmdrdredd]

This isn't a fair question to me. People have a budget, but people also usually say they want more and more performance. That's why they overclock. Not everyone can afford a 3930k on water at 4.8Ghz or whatever. That doesn't mean they would not desire it if it wasn't costly.

 

[bbhaag]

I voted for the second option. My 965BE has and is serving me well at all of my day to day tasks(surfing, email, ect.). I do wish I had a little bit more brute for the video encoding I do. Especially the real time DRM removal and re-encoding of WEBDL videos that I occasionally do. SD is fine but HD content puts my 965 on its knees.

 

[skipsneeky2]

My i5 2500 non k is plenty with its 8gb of ram,my back up which i am using due to a motherboard and memory failure on my i5 is a pos, dell xps 400 with a 3ghzs p4,2.75gb ram and even with a ssd this thing is about to get kicked to the curb and man do i ever wanna kick it so hard.:awe:

Betting my wife would be more then happy with a celeron g1610,4gb of ram and a budget 60gb ssd over this hunk of junk by far.....

 

[escrow4]

Gaming box: 3930K @ 4.3GHz

Work box: G1610 @ 2.6GHz

Laptop: Ivy i3

Server: Xeon E3

I won't upgrade for a long while yet.