8 Cores 8 Threads Vs 8 Cores 16 Threads

[ttran7701]

I noticed the new coffee lakes have two 8 core CUP's. One has 8 threads; the other has 16 threads. Do the extra threads have any benefit in gaming situations, assuming you don't have a ton of other applications running in the background. The clocks of the two CPU's are virtually identical. Is there a benefit to the virtual cores?

 

[trampus123]

not in gaming the extra threads will only benefit things like video editing and rendering I guess if you are gaming and streaming and watching a movie and and and and well you get the picture

 

[TechyInAZ]

Back in the Sandy Bridge days no they didn't, but now with games being severely multithreaded like Battlefield V (Battlefield V takes advantage of all my 16 threads quite easily on my 1700X) there will most certainly be a difference once games go beyond 8 cores.

But for now and for a few years, a pure 8 core is going to do great at gaming, just as good as the hyperthreaded variant albet. But the hyperthreaded CPU should be slightly faster in some titles, just depends on developers.

 

[geofelt]

Ryzen with an abundance of cores/threads would have you believe that many threads is the end all.
From what I read, once you have 4 threads, that is pretty much all you need and higher clock rates become more important.

Windows will spread activity out among all available threads. Just because you see activity on all threads in task manager, it does not mean that these threads are effectively used.
Here are two studies from tom's, they compare 2/4/6/8/10 threads.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-1-directx-12-benchmark,5017-8.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multi-core-cpu-scaling-directx-11,4768.html

I suspect that the upcoming I7-9700K with 8 highly overclockable cores will be very popular for gamers.
On a budget, the i5-9600K will play almost as well.
If price is no object, buy the i9-9900K

I might add that if your games are multiplayer, more threads can help.
Unfortunately, it is hard to conduct a repeatable benchmark for multiplayer games.

Game developers have no incentive to require many threads to run their games; they will not sell as many.

 

[mjbn1977]

The extra threads can help but are not necessary. The sweet spot for gaming will be around 6 to 8 cores for the next few years. If more threads help will depend on how the game developer will optimize the game in terms of processor scaling. But I don't think you will gain much from 16 threads....at least for gaming. If it fits in the budget go for the extra threads....