yet another "Best CPU Under $x" thread ($120ish), gaming-related

[plonk420]

first point: i don't wish to OC. or if i am to, maaaaybe ~2-300mHz on the G3258. i won't OC anything else (if there’s more cores, i’ll likely do some heavy x264 encoding)

i would LIKE to spend ~$70ish on a Pentium G3258, but it doesn't look like it'll play well with some of the games i have or might get.

i have an i7-860 currently. and just got an R9 290 (up from 5870)

i think i'm getting an H81 or B85 (or a miniscule chance an h97) for xmas. i also have an AM3+ board with a fair bit of life left in it.

my main goal is to squeeze out as many FPS out of Skyrim as i can (ENB and amazing beautifying mods that drop FPS down to ~25-35) @ 2560x1600...that high a resolution mainly for screenshot porn). *allegedly* Skyrim only uses dualcore.

a secondary goal is to get more speed out of an AVISynth denoising script (mctemporaldenoise) that is so slow that i barely pull any CPU usage off more than one core when x264ing (altho i'll likely be encoding to a lossless h.264 file so that i can later test encoding the lossless, denoised video at multiple bitrates). it literally runs at .01 or .1fps. anywho, point is i don't need any more than 2 (say, Pentium) cores for this. i'll just use my i7 for final encode.

other games i have and want to play:

Crysis 2 looks okay on an i3-4000 series (already have)

Crysis 3 looks bad on an i3-3000 series, but no idea about i3-4000 (don’t own it, but would be interested for the right price if i end up enjoying 2. also i’m a graphics whore, if you couldn’t tell already.)

Watch_Dogs looks terrible on Pentium but decent on i3 (don’t have, but moderate interest)

i guess SimCity is a lost cause outside of an i5 (not in my current budget) (owned, moderate to low-moderate interest)

maybe Hitman Absolution? looks passable on an i3-3000 (owned, low interest. kinda want to play the others before it)

also Rage. no idea CPU needs, tho. (just got; moderately high interest) as well as Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

and Saints Row 4 (owned; slightly below moderate interest)

and Final Fantasy 13 and Metal Gear Rising and Dark Souls (owned; very low interest)

Future games i’m curious about (hopefully i’ll have a better budget by the time they’re 50% off in price): FF15 and The Divison

anywho, sorry for the long laundry list. can this be doable ~$100-120 or less?

edit: actually, Rage looks okay on anything. and SR4 good enough on an i3-4000.

edit2: i also play a lot of BL2 with friends, but no idea how it'll do on an i3-4000

 

[AtenRa]

Have you OCed your Core i7 860 ??? I wouldn't go to dual core Pentium from that Core i7.

 

[plonk420]

not going to touch OCing my i7, let alone most other high-core count CPUs. the $70 mobo may be on its last legs. and i'm old and crotchety and hate the massive (or even medium sized) CPU coolers (and their backplates) needed to do so.

the Pentium seems power-sipping enough to withstand it, tho.

 

[phasseshifter]

not being a major intell man ...i would use the i7 its a 4 core 8 thread..generally most games well that i know of don't need better than a quad core with a decent set of ram...as for the mobo i am not up with your H81 or B85 chipsets ..also you failed to mention how much ram u r using and a decent cooler would do you justice ..and with that r9 video card ..i have a gs800 corsair running my quad core 4170 with r7900 / r9700..get confused... ati card if you get a new mobo do yourself a favour and don't skimp by using an old power supply...you pose many issues here..with your gaming the intell cpu is going to get rather hot with just a stock cooler..the video card processors wont necessarily do all the work...if you have the type of case that will allow a liquid cooler it would be of an advantage..

 

[plonk420]

my power supply, cpu fan, and ram are sufficient.

also, your "4170" (i thought that was an Intel CPU at first) is dualcore (or rather dual modules) with 4 threads.

not sure where else you're trying to go with your suggestion, but either way, while i'd love liquid cooling, it's unnecessary (edit: for the CPU) and not in my budget.

edit2: also, Sandy Bridge (3.3 ghz) gives a decent FPS boost above Nehalem, let alone Bulldozer. and Haswell should in theory at least equal Sandy. also, Skyrim is supposed to max out at 2 cores.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I cant see any upgrade worth it at 120$ or less from your i7 860. For 200$? Sure.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

The overclocked pentium will outperform the i7-860 in some games, but get beaten in others, mainly the newest console ports.

I run the pentium myself, but I mainly play mechwarrior online, which doesn't scale to lots of cores well. So far everything runs great, but I'm playing a year in the past when it comes to "big" aaa games, most of them are a mess on launch anyway. I've only just bought total war rome 2. When dragonage inquisition is $15 and it runs badly, well, we'll see about upgrading.

Anyway, with that 290 you really want a haswell i5 or something, so stretch the budget, or sell off some hardware

 

[cbn]

After reading the OP (and your desire not to overclock) It sounds like you have only two choices if buying a new processor:

1. Haswell Core i3

2. FX-8300 (or FX-8310).

Certainly the Core i3 is the best choice for Skyrim, not sure how a stock clocked FX-8300/8310 would compare to your i7-860 in Watch Dogs?

Regarding the Crysis 3 results, they mention using the first level called "Post Human" for benchmarrking.

We're using Fraps to measure frame rates during 90 seconds of gameplay footage from Crysis 3's first level, "Post Human." The test starts as soon as Michael "Psycho" Sykes hands you his backup weapon, we then simply follow the party leader until the time runs out.

That is not a really challenging level. What really hits the cpu cores hard is the next level called "Welcome to the Jungle" (seen below). In this scenario I would expect the FX-83xxx to do much better than what you are seeing in the results.

(The train yard in "Welcome to the Jungle")

 

[Yuriman]

Skyrim will be faster on the i3 than your i7, and on the FX it will actually be slower. If your denoise script will only take advantage of a single core, you may find your encoding is faster too, while going with an FX8 would also be counterproductive here. However, the i3 has less raw grunt and will be slower than your i7 when all threads are filled. OP, I don't think you can get an all-around upgrade within your budget, and may not be able to for a few more years yet, but an i3 *may* benefit you somewhat in these two workloads.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I would stick with the i7-860 until you can spend $180 to upgrade to an i5-4440 or better. The Pentium would be an absolute disaster with an R9 290. See this video about how bad it bottlenecks the GTX 780, a weaker card than the R9 290 but one that should perform significantly better in a such a CPU bottlenecked scenario (I guess it's driver overhead, but Nvidia seems to do a lot better than AMD in really CPU bound situations, a problem that completely goes away if you use an i5 instead)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub3lzTplYxM

The Pentium just isn't an option with an R9 290. The 290 is such a monster of a GPU and needs an i5 or better to run at its full potential.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Though out the box Skyrim can run with a good FPS on a Pentium, and really good FPS if you overclock it. At least with a GTX 680.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2014/06/24/intel-pentium-g3258-review/5

Not sure how it performs with an AMD GPU on the Pentium.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Skyrim will be faster on the i3 than your i7, and on the FX it will actually be slower. If your denoise script will only take advantage of a single core, you may find your encoding is faster too, while going with an FX8 would also be counterproductive here. However, the i3 has less raw grunt and will be slower than your i7 when all threads are filled. OP, I don't think you can get an all-around upgrade within your budget, and may not be able to for a few more years yet, but an i3 *may* benefit you somewhat in these two workloads.

At 25x16 resolution with graphics mods I doubt his CPU will matter much in Skyrim. Even with an R9 290 I think he'll be GPU limited 99% of the time.

OP, I'd stay with what you have until your budget can allow for a more sizable upgrade. At your price range I think just about everything will be a side grade to minor upgrade in some areas and minor downgrade in others.

 

[cbn]

Skyrim is supposed to max out at 2 cores.

If you look at Benchmarks, Skyrim does scale beyond two cores.

But something like FX 8xxxx is going to be slower because the single thread is lower than Haswell and the game is not well threaded enough to make use of eight weaker AMD cores.

 

[plonk420]

thanks for all the feedback! turns out i might be closer to an i5 than i thought... maybe in a paycheck or two if my car holds up!

i could have sworn i saw an "officialish source" say it was mainly dualcore, but i can't find it. and, one can only deny benchmarks so much without being delusional

i also considered sharing my screenshots, but i don't have a particularly flashy ENB, and they look pretty dull and subtly improved compared to some of the stuff seen in Dead End Thrills and other ENB'd Skyrim collections. i'm not sure if the eyecandy-saturated colors that they use will "break realism" more so than my current settings...

 

[Gikaseixas]

i5 if you can
You wont have to OC to extract reasonable performance out of it.

 

[cbn]

i could have sworn i saw an "officialish source" say it was mainly dualcore, but i can't find it. and, one can only deny benchmarks so much without being delusional

I've seen that same comment myself many times and It probably depends on the scene in Skyrim being tested, but if you take a look at the following benchmark Steve linked in a previous post:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2014/06/24/intel-pentium-g3258-review/5

(^^^ stock clocked 3.4 Ghz i5-4670K is beating a 4.8 Ghz G3258: 145 FPS vs 127 FPS. So quad core at lower clocks with mild turbo is beating a much faster dual core. Interestingly, the same 4.8 Ghz G3258 is beating the Haswell i3-4130: 127 FPS vs. 87 FPS in that same benchmark)

And then there is this benchmark showing a Core i3-4160 beating an 4.7 Ghz G3258:

 

[plonk420]

that's kind of a bummer, tho, as i wanted to hold off spending more than minimal money until broadwell came out...

 

[seitur]

Change to any dual core from your i7 will be a downgrade.

Either stay with your current i7 for a longer time or pony up more than 120$.

Fairly simple.

 

[R0H1T]

that's kind of a bummer, tho, as i wanted to hold off spending more than minimal money until broadwell came out...

Then wait for broadwell or skylake if it's not totally unavoidable. Also with skylake you may have a chance to go with DDR4 & that'll be a substantial upgrade in perf, certainly in due course of time with speeds of upto 4000MHz in the not too distant future.

 

[escrow4]

There is no point buying anything under an i5. Not only is it a sidegrade it simply won't hold up in 2015. Dual cores are dead for gaming.

 

[plonk420]

i ended up getting a Pentium G3258 and will wait for a better job to get an i5 or i7 on Broadwell or Skylake or later... i think i've tripled (or more) my encode speeds with my denoising chain, so i'm happy with that.

4.1gHz on stock cooler and temps around 57-64C on the digital sensors. and either 38C (temp1) or 56C (temp3) on the analog sensor. don't think i'm going to push this very hard unless i really hate it and want to kill it (and/or get a bigger CPU fan)

 

[schmuckley]

Skyrim runs just fine on a g3258

 

[jji7skyline]

Skyrim runs just fine on a g3258

Can confirm. The G3258 doesn't bottleneck at all even on Ultra settings. May be different if using mods, but most graphics mods are GPU anyway. The great thing about the G3258 is you have an awesome future upgrade path.

This way you can upgrade to an i5 sooner than if you had spent more money on an i3.

 

[soccerballtux]

I would stick with the i7-860 until you can spend $180 to upgrade to an i5-4440 or better. The Pentium would be an absolute disaster with an R9 290. See this video about how bad it bottlenecks the GTX 780, a weaker card than the R9 290 but one that should perform significantly better in a such a CPU bottlenecked scenario (I guess it's driver overhead, but Nvidia seems to do a lot better than AMD in really CPU bound situations, a problem that completely goes away if you use an i5 instead)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub3lzTplYxM

The Pentium just isn't an option with an R9 290. The 290 is such a monster of a GPU and needs an i5 or better to run at its full potential.

there's little point in Intel under $200 and especially the dual cores when compared with the $100 fx-8300

 

[VirtualLarry]

there's little point in Intel under $200 and especially the dual cores when compared with the $100 fx-8300

Not true. If you can get a G3258 + mobo combo for $100, and use the stock (copper-cored) cooler, then you save a bundle compared to a $120 mobo (need beefy / heatsinked VRMs for AMD FX), $100 for the FX CPU, and then another $30-60 for a beefy cooler to overclock it. (Because the G3258 will have better single-threaded performance.)

I would make the opposite argument. If you're going to spend that much on AMD, you might as well buy Intel, like a high-clocked Haswell i3, if your goal is to play games with the rig.