[SOLVED] May I switch the CPU?

[Vox]

Hi there,
I'd like to speed up my daughter's PC. I have 2 CPUs with motherboards and I'm unsure if it's worth replacing the CPU:

from the AMD A10-5800K to an Intel Pentium G4560.

The current "rig" is an FM2 mobo with the mentioned A10-5800K, we use the integrated GPU. It has an SSD, a HDD and 4GB of DD3 RAM.

I’m not sure if replacing the processor to the Intel one would make the computer slower or faster, given my daughter’s user habits: She's using the machine 99% of time watching medium-quality (480p / 720p) anime videos on the monitor. Within this 99% she's also doing a lot of torrenting and copying these movies from folders to folders around the drive to categorize. Most of times she's doing this multiplied so copying more than one movie at a time, and many times she's watching 2 videos at once windowed while sometimes other videos are also opened and paused in the background. 1% of her time she uses Microsoft Teams for school and rarely she's browsing the internet with Chrome (dozens of opened tabs). No games playing outside of some browser-type flash games, like Fireboy-Watergirl, etc. However the resources of the PC are usually drained to dust and everything is very slow because of these multitasks.

Would a change to G4560 provide faster performance in these tasks? I've read through many comparison site over the internet, cpu-world.com, cpu.userbechmark.com, technical.city, cpubenchmark.net, cpu-monkey, etc, etc, and while most of them are rating the G4560 faster in the usual benchmark apps, I'm still not convinced if it would be faster for my daughter's habit specifically, because

• The AMD has 4 cores while the G4560 has only 2 cores,
• The base clock speed is also much higher on AMD,
• The Intel has Hyperthreading while AMD has not,
• The AMD is unlocked but I wouldn't overclock it if it's not really necessary,
• The Intel is missing many instruction sets that the AMD has,
• The AMD's GPU (Radeon HD7660D) is a lot faster than G4560's GPU (HD 610). 0.80 vs 0.35 Ghz. – I'm not sure if this has any impact on playing medium quality movies.

So what do you think about this CPU change? Would it be a speed gain or a speed loss for what she's using the PC?

 

[Vox]

Further....if you do this swap, and it 'feels' faster, that will almost certainly be due to having a bare, pristine, brand new OS install.
You're not operating with several years worth of old gunk in the system.

I understand, thanks for your reply. There are mixed answers leaning toward both CPUs for various reasons. Anyway I'll take this result as a very minor change between the two CPUs that -as you told earlier- a change is not really worth the effort.

 

[Vox]

Sheesh, so many hyptothetical. The differences between these CPUs is nothing. The only way you'll know if it matters at all is by testing it all, which makes me side by @USAFRet. Effort is everything.

In the end spent so much time thinking this out and you'll get 0 accurate answer as there is no one here who has both CPUs and has tested them both in your usecase.

My two cents are that you're probably going to notice a tiny performance bump, if there's any bump at all. Don't bring DDR4 into this mix as well.. If so, replace your entire Mobo/CPU/RAM combo for a i5-6600K or better or any Ryzen series.

Jeez, don't be so frustrating, we all know it's a hypothetical question and nobody wants accurate answers, Thats why we use these forums to get opinions from other users for our many hypothetical questions. Would there be any meaning to ask if I could get speed upgrade from an Intel Core i7-9700K compared to my low-end CPU? Zero meaning... Here's a valid forum question to which there is no clear answer.

 

[USAFRet]

we all know it's a hypothetical question and nobody wants accurate answers

hehehe...

I've seen people here with a similar question, and get all wrapped around the axle when an exact percentage increase is not supplied.

"Why can't you just tell me how much?"
'Because...it depends'
"Bah! You guys are useless!!"

 

[Mr.Spock]

any improvement is marginal as you’re just adding a few cycles on clock and splitting time on a physical core, it’s not like the difference is 20-25% the comparison is still ballpark

The linked CPU is a Skylake G4520 which has no Hyper-threading support and only has 2 threads while the Kaby Lake G4560 has 4. The G4520 also has a worse int. GPU and slower memory bandwith. Am I right that these have a lot of impact on multitasking?
Too bad, the Anandtech website doesn't know the G4560.