[SOLVED] What matters for productivity, cores or threads?

[Bruno Vincent]

I have an i5-8400 and now I've started to use a virtual machine, works fine, but wondering if getting a faster chip like the i7 8700 would make a difference because it has 12 threads instead of 6?

How would the extra threads benefit me?

I don't game, only productivity:

- opening programs
- zip / unzip files
- system responsiveness

I use virtual box, and it runs windows 10 virtually at the same speed as the guest , bench marked them with app timer and performance is identical between host and guest machine.

 

[Obakasama]

Not sure how much running a virtual machine will make (someone else will know).

But the boring answer to the core/thread part of the question is... it depends on the software you're using. As I understand it Adobe's software doesn't scale up with more cores/threads preferring clockspeed for more performance.

 

[fry178]

most stuff nowadays is using more than 4-6 cores, so higher is usually better,
especially with programs (vs games).

virtual box can run on more than physical cores, but will lead to bsods under high load.
dont go past the physical number of cores and you be fine.
that said, the i7 wont help, you need more physical cores (not HT).

you can switch to something like a xeon (needs new board) if you want to stay with intel,
or save some money and replace cpu/board/ram with a 16 core threadripper.

since the cpu is decent, make sure you run the OS/software of a fast (maybe MLC) ssd.
try to avoid latest (2018 and newer) tlc based drives, as they tend to be much slower than previous gen.

even that the drive i tested came with good 3D nand, slc and dram cache, it was so slow, loading the map at game start was so bottlenecked,
starting the round got delayed by about 20-30s each time, comparable to someone with old hardware/single hdd.
replaced the drive with a three year old 60gb ssd, no probs.

one reason i swapped all drives for ssd's years ago, as the OS gets more responsive when read/write isnt limited to hdd speeds.

and depending how long its been since setup, after 1-2y windows usually will also lose a bit perf,
so if your switching to an ssd, a clean install would be a good idea.