Do GHZ really affect the performance?

[tjokrohw]

FOR EXAMPLE:
IF I HAD i5-4440 3.1GHZ and R9 270X, the performance would be good.
And If I change the i5-4440 to i5-4570 or even i5-4670 (3.2 GHZ/3.4 GHZ) will it affect the performance especially gaming?

 

[whitecat]

in these case not much because only the frequency is increased by 3-10% . Of course , if you can afford it -the more the better.

 

[WhiteSnake91]

I've often wondered this myself, would a person be better off even with a cheap locked lower clocked i5 or getting a 6300 fx or 8320fx and overclocking them?

myself, I think it might not matter as much as making sure you have a good enough GPU

or, comparing a stock 3470 to say a 3570k at 4.4ghz

 

[tjokrohw]

in these case not much because only the frequency is increased by 3-10% . Of course , if you can afford it -the more the better.

Do you think 3.1GHZ is good enough for VGA Radeon R9 270X?
Or should I upgrade to 3.2 or 3.4 one?

 

[James Mason]

There's more to a processor then just it's GHZ though, it's Cache sizes are also pretty important.

 

[whitecat]

in these case not much because only the frequency is increased by 3-10% . Of course , if you can afford it -the more the better.

Do you think 3.1GHZ is good enough for VGA Radeon R9 270X?
Or should I upgrade to 3.2 or 3.4 one?

More than enough , but get the fastest you can

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

Your i5 is fine.

 

[jaguarskx]

Frequency can affect performance, but it depends on the game. The more dependent the game is on the CPU, the higher the potential performance improvement. It is also not 100% efficient; meaning if you increase the frequency by 10% your performance will not increase by 10%.

Going from 3.2GHz to 3.4GHz is a 6.25% increase in performance. So in the perfect scenario gaming performance will increase by 6.25%. In the real world performance gains will be from 0% to probably 3%.


Bioshock Infinite is an example of a game that is known for not caring too much about the CPU performance. Below are two benchmarks for overclocked i7-3770k and FX-8350 CPU with a GTX 680. Note that you do not get much performance increase from overclocking the i7-3770k. Going from 2.5GHz to 4.0GHz (60% increase) the frame rate increases from 65 FPS to 69 FPS (6.1%). Going from 4.0GHz to 4.5GHz does not increase game performance at all; so 500MHz = 0 FPS. The performance increase is even worse for the FX-8350. Starting at 2.5GHz you would need to increase the frequency to 4.5GHz to get 1 extra FPS.

http://www.techspot.com/review/655-bioshock-infinite-performance/page5.html

SimCity is known for being a CPU intensive game. It is also known for taking a dump of those people who loved that series in the past because EA forced SimCity (a traditionally single player game) to be an online game which I suppose ruined the entire experience for veteran "SimCity-ers".

Again, starting with a base frequency of 2.5GHz, the game does experience an increase in performance as the frequency goes up. When the i7-3770k is clocked to 3.5GHz (40% increase), the FPS actually increased by 13 FPS (43%) which is pretty much unprecedented. I think you will find it extremely difficult to find another game than can do that. However, going from 3.5GHz to 4.5GHz only yields another 2 FPS. As for the FX-8350, going from 2.5GHz to 3.5GHz provides a 8 FPS increase (33.33%). However, going from 3.5GHz to 4.5GHz (28.6%) yields another 8 FPS increase (25%). FPS increases scales better on the FX-8350 than the i7-3770k, but as can be seen by the charts an i7-3770k @ 3.5GHz still beats a FX-8350 at 4.5GHz.


http://www.techspot.com/review/648-simcity-performance/page4.html

 

[maxalge]

I've often wondered this myself, would a person be better off even with a cheap locked lower clocked i5 or getting a 6300 fx or 8320fx and overclocking them?

myself, I think it might not matter as much as making sure you have a good enough GPU

or, comparing a stock 3470 to say a 3570k at 4.4ghz

Actually, those locked i5's offer performance that easily matches/beats overclocked amd processors with the deck stacked in the amd's favor with a game that uses as many threads as ya have.

For example BF4.


A 4.5 ghz 8350 barely eeks out a 1 fps win over a locked 3470 in arguably the best possible scenario.

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

Now imagine in games that only use 1-4 cores? Yeah.

Simcity clearly shows what happens.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-6.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-8.html