Question I5-3450 good for gaming?

[erniskunkys]

I was wondering if the I5-3450 is still good for gaming I had this CPU for awhile and so far didnt have much problems but when recently I have upgraded to a GTX 1060 6gb I am struggling to run games that I should be able to run fine with this GPU like watch dogs 2 and wildlands I can still play allot of games at a good frame rate and good settings like for honor apex legends and more. I was wondering if anyone has this CPU and runs games like watch dogs 2 and wildlands fine and if I were to upgrade my CPU which one would you recommend that could use the full potential of my graphics card when playing games?

 

[Zephyl]

The 3450 is still a pretty decent CPU, but it may be causing a bottleneck in some games. I would recommend a 3rd-gen i7 if you don't want to have to upgrade your motherboard as well. The 3770, maybe? Make sure to cool it adequately. Also, make sure you have a reliable power supply for this setup.

 

[Solandri]

Since about 2004, processors have only increased speed (per clock cycle) by about 5% every generation (about 1.5 years). This is in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s when they roughly doubled in speed every 1.5 years. So Ivy Bridge (2012) is actually within about 25%-30% of Coffee Lake's performance clock for clock (for the same number of cores) despite being 7 years old. There are a few specialized computations which have improved from the instructions being moved to dedicated hardware. But overall the performance difference is not that great. Especially in something like games where you're usually GPU-bound, not CPU-bound. Here's a comparison of Sandy Bridge (Ivy Bridge is a die shrink of Sandy Bridge) vs Coffee Lake. And you can see that for the most part there's not much performance difference in games.

https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/for...7-2600k-vs-i7-8700k-upgrading-worthwhile.html

As for i5 vs i7, the i7 has a slightly larger L3 cache and allows hyperthreading. The L3 cache generally only helps with large data sets (data compression and encryption). There are a handful of games which see some benefit from hyperthreading, but the vast majority see little to no benefit (a few poorly-threaded games even run slower with hyperthreading on). It's usually massively multiplayer games (where your computer has to track the movement and activity of dozens if not hundreds of other players on the same playfield) which make extensive use of the CPU.

So unless you play games which specifically benefit from the newer processors or from hyperthreading, I'd stick with your i5-3450. It's still a good processor. Would be a different story if you had gotten an i3.

 

[tennis2]

What motherboard do you have?

 

[erniskunkys]

What motherboard do you have?

I have the ASROCK H61M-HVS

 

[tennis2]

Aw bummer, nvm on the non-K overclocking then.

 

[InvalidError]

Since about 2004, processors have only increased speed (per clock cycle) by about 5% every generation (about 1.5 years). This is in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s when they roughly doubled in speed every 1.5 years.

Clock frequency is only half the story. The architecture itself has also become several times faster. If you had a strict in-order cache-less non-pipelined CPU (that's what most people had in the 80s) running at 5GHz, performance would be horrible by today's standards at 200-1000X slower due to the CPU wasting most of its time waiting after RAM: you have 0.2ns cycle time with ~12ns memory, which means you spend 60 clock cycles fetching the next instruction, 60 clocks fetching the first operand from memory, 60 clocks reading the second operand from memory if applicable and within an open memory row, 60 clocks writing the result back, increase penalties to hundreds of ticks whenever memory rows need to be closed and opened between operations or even within a single operation in some cases.