Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: January 2012 (Archive)

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considering that most newer games require a minimum of 3ghz of CPU power I'm not sure that would be the best choice considering that you have to overclock it to get to that
 

And then there is the 40-50% performance improvement on Core-iX from architectural improvements and integrated memory controller which makes 3GHz on Core-iX a fairly different story from 3GHz on Core 2 Duo/Quad even before accounting for HT and/or extra cores on Core-iX.
 


Agreed, I wouldn't really want anything less powerful than an FX 6300 or i3 4130. I don't have a problem with buying used older gen parts with comparable or better performance though.
 
Tom
It is great that you review various systems and system components. But the technology is moving away from pure Linux or Windows desktops to hybrids. By September we should see dual boot systems with Android and Windows 8.

Why I say this is that it is time for Tom's hardware to offer to sell the computer systems and components that you would purchase for yourself. In Tom we trust, in others, its Marketing. So, if you tell me that a great system for Business is xyz, and your price is $xyz , or $xyz+100 for technical support, I would make that purchase from you.

My two cents worth.
 
Anybody know if AMD will really put out an update to their fx vishera line? If they do in 2015, we'd probably have to get a new motherboard, right? I just got my fx6300 and mid tier asus mobo a few months ago so I probably will have to upgrade both, me thinks.
 

motherboard: which one?
 


Not sure I'd buy a PC from someone who can't keep a simple CPU hierarchy chart straight - dooohhhhh!

[flash=320,240]http://www.youtube.com/v/gNraiEToB8c[/flash]
 
can someone confirm that my core i5 3330 is as good or better than all piledriver cpu,s ... the toms hardware hierarchy chart shows my i5 3330 above all AMD cpu,s and miles above my previous cpu namely the pentium G620 !
 


Yes, strictly speaking, when only looking at gaming performance and using FPS as the main criteria, I would expect your CPU to match or outperform any AMD CPU at stock settings if each were run in a system where all other parts were identical.

This says absolutely nothing about performance in any other PC related task from basic web browsing to complex photo/video editing/encoding and compiling large computer programs.
 

It depends on the task. The 3330 is more efficient at single-threaded applications, so everyday use and basic computing will be just as good or better than any PD chip. In games, again, you likely won't see any difference. If you're throwing massive number crunching and a lot of threads at your CPU, the six- and eight-core PDs can start to pull away.
 


Well... According to the latest sub $200 article:

Average.png


So, yes, your Ivybridge i5 should be better... and miles away from G620...
 

Interesting. This article shows slightly different results - when overclocking is taken into consideration. But still the i5 would be on top, but the Overclocked 6350 would probably be close to the 3330 .....

Combined-Average-Gaming-Performance.png


 
Yeah this article is newer although its not a CPU shoot out, will be fine, since we still don't have the 2014's sub $200 Gaming Shoot-Out.

Tom's Hardware never takes in consideration the overclocked results when they are suggesting CPUs or when they are creating the CPU hierarchy.
 


Right - and this article uses a much wider variety of games rather than the "Best CPU's for the $$" piddly 3.
 


I think that you misread what I wrote, please read it again...
And really, there is no need to insult an article...
 
Gaming computers are only one measure of system erformance. I like to measure the speed of I/O transfer. If after I download a DVD image to my download directory, I would like to measure how long it takes me to copy it from there to the storage disk (Disk #3 on my system). Both disks are a pair of Seagate 1 terabyters. After that, frames per second for the video cards.

If the CPUs are faster than I/O interrupts, but file copies are sloooowww who cares? I do. I use my systems for compiling. Compiling is a good mix of both cpu and disk use.

I am anxious to read about the newer hard disk technologies with front-end 16 SDD cache ahead of two terrabyte drives. I would like to see if the drives and the SDD cache be battery backed up, so that a power-down will not result in hard drive's loss of data.
 

Whatever, how about clarifying your point if you think I misread.

And yes, I slightly insulted one article and complimented another. The article I referenced (and its Intel-focused sister article) have been mainstay reference articles for me since they came out - a much more valuable reference than this "Best Gaming CPUs for the $$" - (oops, I hope I didn't insult this article again...)

Tom's does measure overclocking for every CPU and GPU they test - they just don't reference it in this article for their rankings, which is a shame (I don't know... insulting??).

If you keep up with the posts in this article, you'll see a tremendous amount of user feedback and corrections which has been ignored. So yes, the feedback will tend to turn to criticism in that case - and if you think my comment was "insulting", then you should read some of the other ones.

But then again, I may be "misreading" your comments, so please, clarify if you must.....
 
I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it to upgrade my i5-2500k oc'd to 4.2Ghz stable for almost 3 years I think. I have a GTX 780 and it's really good. I'm my missing out by not going with a 4670k? I could also upgrade to the 3770k and that would drop right into my motherboard.
 


Why are you so agressive?
As I said, there is no need for you to be.
And that's the part of your misreading. I agree with you. I wrote that your article is newer, so its more accurate.
Yeah this article is newer although its not a CPU shoot out, will be fine
Click to expand...
Anyway, I disagree with Tom's hierarchy and recommendations too.
pe: i5 2300 has not the same performance with 4770/4670, nor the i7 950 is one tier less 🙂/) than i3 2100.
Also I can't see how they can recommend 4770K and then recommend 4930K at $200 higher while their charts showing same performance...

And as for your statement of "intel focused sister article", I suppose you are saying this, for the games they choose. Well when you want to find a good gaming cpu, you want to see its performance on the games you want to play. And some of them (like Skyrim) are running better on systems with high performance per core, which happens for Intel to have the upper hand here.
So you don't have to accuse the article, but instead accuse the developer of the game(s) and the millions of the people that bought it(them) (and then flood the forums of "plz make me an $xxx PC that can play skyrim").
 
We have seen a small handful of titles benefit from Hyper-Threaded Core i7 processors, though. Because we believe this is a trend that will continue as developers optimize their software, we're including the Core i7-4770K as an honorable mention, now selling for $340. In a vast majority of games, the Core i7 won't demonstrate much advantage over the Core i5. But if you're a serious enthusiast who wants some future-proofing and values highly-threaded application performance, this processor may be worth the extra money.

In addition, there's certainly an argument to be made for using LGA 2011 as the ultimate gaming platform. LGA 2011-based CPUs have more available cache and as many as two more execution cores than the flagship LGA 1150/1155 models. Additionally, more bandwidth is delivered through a quad-channel memory controller. And with 40 lanes of third-gen PCIe connectivity available from Ivy Bridge-E-based processors (we're assuming that if you're building on X79 today, you're using a Core i7-4000-series chip), the platform natively supports two x16 and one x8 slot, or one x16 and three x8 slots, alleviating potential bottlenecks in three- and four-way CrossFire or SLI configurations.
Click to expand...

The main reason for recommending the i7-4930K is more PCIe lanes, and for the very few insanely well threaded games.
 


More PCIe lanes are definitely an advantage.

Also, something I have learned is if you want to broadcast and stream BF4 and other content (music, webcam) while playing BF4 multi-player on the same PC, all 12 threads are engaged to some extent. I think we can safely say the gaming world is becoming multi-threaded. The new consoles are also now using the same functionality with streaming while gaming now. This isn't for everyone, but if people want to get their twitch on, I'd say definitely go with more cores/threads for gaming.
 




Well the only advantage is the more cores since Z87 mobos with PLX chip cost $280 and the cheapest mobos of Z79 cost around $200.
And since the CPUs have $240 ($579-$339) difference I think we can go down to the $160 difference which comes the price of the two extra cores.

The other difference is that Haswell has slightly better IPC than Ivybridge Extreme. It will be slower in 4 (or less) threaded games.

So it comes down to this: Paying $160 for more performance on rare games that are well threaded and less performance on games that are not well threaded.

The biggest advantage here is... the future. More and more games will become multithreaded so the 4930K will have more future than a 4770K.
 
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