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

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All cores/threads will be "engaged to some extent" even with single-threaded software due to the single thread getting scheduled to different cores/threads all the time unless the software requests core affinity to prevent that.

If you want the real picture of how much effective multi-threading an application does, open Process Explorer or equivalent utility and look at applications' CPU usage on a per-thread basis.
 


You are right about the TIM but the more OC headroom its not true. Both they are not good at OC. To be honest, I didn't find a hardware review site (just a little research) that their i7 4960X was o/c more than their 4770K in their reviews.
I guess the better TIM is needed at the 4930K cause it should have higher TDP.
 
thanks guys ... i knew my core i5 3330 was a decent processor but i didnt know how good ... with a strict and limited budget i was lucky to get the i5 3330 and was originally going to get a core i3 .... my next upgrade is to replace my HD6790 ... its not a bad gpu but im looking at a GTX750ti.. however i will wait till summer and the prices may come down .. that said you can get them for around £110 which isnt too bad .. also the GTX750ti,s amazing power requirements mean i can still use my 500w ocz stealthxstream ...

 
Why have they not even updated the charts in... how long?

I still don't see any A10-7850K/or any of the new AMD APU's, or what about the Ivy Bridge E 4930K,etc, no time to even edit the chart a little and add in some of the newer CPU's?
 
AMD FX 6300 or Intel i3-4130?
I'm not upgrading nor overclocking
and gonna pair it with an Msi gtx 750 ti
help please 😀
 


For gaming I assume?, I would say go with the i3-4130 for gaming, much better single thread performance, lower power/heat, and if you ever do want to upgrade you will at least have the choice to. :)
 


Which in most gaming scenarios is irrelevant, although I would get the i3 because he can get a decent and cheap motherboard for it, while the FX-6300 will require something a little more expensive to handle its power draw and he may end up also feeling uncomfortable with its temperature and might need to replace the stock cooler with an after market one which will even add more to the cost of an AMD build. He also said he won't upgrade so the Intel build presumably having a better upgrade path is irrelevant to him as well. But if he can afford it he would probably be much happier with a locked i5-4440.
 


This article is pretty old. Also they have a SB and an IB i3 chips on top of all what AMD had to offer back at that time which I find quite strange. They even have the Phenoms II only second to the FX-8350 on the AMD side, most new games doesn't show such a high placing for these chips as when compared with FX chips. Also I don't think that "Average game performance" is a good assessment of a gaming CPU performance, it is well knows how much AMD processors' performance plummets when single core strength matters the most, for example a game like Skyrim can really hurt that "Average" and give a false indication of the overall processor performance in other games as well. So whether i5-3330 is better than all Piledriver chips or not mainly depends on the game.

 


If relatively few games go over 2 threads the PentiumG wouldn't be at the rock bottom of almost every gaming chart from the last few years, and it would have been the perfect performance for dollar chip. And "Got it beat pretty badly" is an over statement, it is probably the other way around, there is a smaller number of games where Intel single threaded superiority actually cause a significant difference in gaming performance, and they are usually pretty badly coded games as well.
 


Maybe you are forgetting that there are other games beside the three games they used in this article to compare performance? Also something that I have already pointed out before, this 'Average' performance assessment approach by adding up the performance percentage for each game and diving it by the total doesn't really mean much, since in titles such as Skyrim or Starcraft, AMD chips will have a significantly lower performance than their Intel counterparts which is bound to affect the total average. That is why it is better to choose a budget gaming CPU based on what games you are playing rather than what 'Average performance across a few number of games" indicates. Even a PentiumG will run most older games and emulators like Dolphin and probably PCSX2 as well faster than even the FX-8350.


 
Yeah --- you'll never get Tom's to change that "Average Gaming Performance' thing :lol: -- and it is highly misleading.

Most games will show little variance in FPS but the 'usual suspects' may show quite a difference. Using the Skyrim example really skews the results unfairly, and does not acknowledge while one rig may get 20+ FPS more, the other is still pushing 60-70 FPS :ouch:

 
The old referenced article also has only 5 titles. I like to use these two articles as a reference:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-wolfdale-yorkfield-comparison,3487.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-overclocking,3584-19.html

These were back-to-back articles - granted on Ivy Bridge, but still with a much better selection of games. The first focuses on Intel, the second on AMD, with an Intel vs. AMD summary in back.

If you bring these articles up in two pages side-by-side and step through the games, you'll see where the additional cores matters.

And to 2nd Wisecracker's comments, if you look at the games where you are close to the edge of being playable, where every FPS starts to matter, you'll see the 6 cores winning out over the i3.

Also, something that I have learned is that other activities that tend to complement gaming (i.e. video recording/transcoding, compressing large file folders, installing mods and large patches), will do much better with more cores. Same goes if you want to do any other activities while gaming (i.e. streaming video or music or conversing on skype).

So depending on your gaming style and the specific types of games you will play should help you decide.
 


So the i3 then? Because I won't overclock the FX. And I don't have money for the i5. Will be using a cx430w and a Gtx 750 ti. Playing games on 1080p. Mostly LoL, Dota 2, CS:GO and BF4. And also upcoming games like Watch Dogs, AC Unity, etc. and by the what cheap mobo do you recommend on the i3? I was thinking of these two: Asus B85M-G or Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H

 

Well, Elder Scrolls Online gives you somewhat similar results but at framerates where it matters - the FX-8350 barely breaking 40 FPS, for example.
 


The same argument again. Like I said before and I say it again, the game is poorly optimized and is hardly a good example, not to mention that these are not huge performance differences to start with, a 3 fps difference in the min fps (which is more important to playability) between the i5 and the FX-8350 from 41 to 38 will not make the game any less playable and won't even be noticable. Also the i5 is only 6 fps over 40 fps when it comes to average while the i3 0.8 higher than the FX-8350. So basically "hardly breaking 40 fps" makes it sound as if the i3 was 10-20 fps faster and the i5 was having double the fps which is not the case. Unless you are playing competitive shooters then every frame counts only when you are having frame rate fluctuations below 30 fps. I bet if you ever played the game on an AMD machine with the FX-8350 and an i5-3550 machine you won't even notice the difference. Now when it comes to the FX-6300 which is clocked 500 MHz lower than the FX-8350, it is a different story, the min fps at least dips to 33. So yeah maybe for a game like that the i3 is the better processor.
 
I agree that in day to day use, the difference between an AMD FX and Intel i5 is not likely to be substantial, but it is worth pointing out that the [slightly faster] Intel system will also use less power than the AMD system. That means less noise and less heat as well, which also equates to less power used elsewhere.
Scrapping an AMD system for an Intel one would be penny wise and pound foolish, but if you're building new, quite frankly today AMD does not make sense for high-end gaming builds. I'm not a fanboy; I've got both, but the AMD system sits mostly idle now except to get updates.
 
Haswell chips run pretty hot actually from what I read on forums so a TDP does not directly indicate what temperature the CPU will be running at at full load or near full load conditions, also from personal experience my old Intel stock cooler was MUCH louder under full cpu load, and I have seen posts confirming that the newer stock cooler which is not that much different, isn't better.
Intel is not slightly faster when it comes to a single threaded task, it is actually significantly faster, but the point is whether that has as much influence on gaming performance as some like to emphasize or not. A lot of people like to exaggerate the deltas when it comes to games that are badly coded to start with.
Unless you are running your system at full load 24/7 and electricity is pretty expensive where you live then power consumption is and will never be as much of a major issue as well.
For a high-end gaming build you may as well go with the i7-4770k, but a lot of people have limited budgets and so they are stuck with options like the FX-6300 VS. the i3-4130, and in that case there is no clear winner in my opinion, unless you have brand preferences or a certain game that you like that runs on one chip better than the other. Also whether DirectX12 will make a huge difference in the way games multi-thread in practice or not and whether that will actually benefits AMD's weaker cores remains to be seen.
 
I'm waiting for someone to write a game that does something utterly new, like use GPGPU processing to create a new kind of AI. This could do more for realism and immersion than any graphics technology, and further alter the balance of CPU vs. GPU.
 

It's a good example, not a bad one. Many games are relatively unoptimized. Whether those games could theoretically run better is irrelevant, what matters is how they run in real life on the hardware people are buying.
 

Haswell chips tend to have high temperatures internally, but that only makes the cooler more efficient. The larger the temperature difference, the higher the heat flux. And the higher the heat dissipation with a given heatsink and a given fan RPM.

The internal temperature of the CPU has very little to do with how much heat is dissipated into the case, or with how much electrical power it draws.

Intel stock coolers are actually very quiet as long as the thermal load is reasonable. If you try overclocking on them, they can get horrendously loud. That's why you don't overclock on a stock cooler (this goes for both Intel and AMD).
 

This is technically incorrect. The Haswell chips have higher temperature because the thermal compound between the chip and the lid is grossly inefficient. Therefore, it requires a higher temperature in order to achieve the same amount of heat transfer. So this is actually more inefficient.

But your overall point is correct. TDP, not temperature, indicates how much heat needs to be removed, and the Intel CPUs have that advantage.
 
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