Oh boy... that's a lot of questions. I'll try my best to address them all.
anthonio5636 :
So I'm looking at spending about $1000ish on building on a computer and I'm trying to decide what CPU to buy.
You can go with AMD or Intel. The budget is the deciding factor. The majority of games do not use more than two cores so there's no reason to buy a CPU with more cores if you won't end up using them.
The ideal candidate right now is an Intel Core i5-4690 or Intel Core i5-4690K (if overclocking). On the AMD side, it will be FX-6300, FX-8320, or FX-8350. But AMD has dropped the FX series to work on their APU series so there will be no direct upgrades if you go that route.
anthonio5636 :
So I figured looking at a benchmark site (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php) would help me make a decision.
Synthetic benchmarks won't help you in a real-world case scenario.
anthonio5636 :
So could someone explain what exactly "cores" are and what it means to have multiple cores.
This will start off as a tangent to your question but play along. You are the CEO of a company that develops video games. Your company has two facilities in different regions. Let's call those facilities West One and East One. In West One, you have four employees (yourself not included). In East One, you have eight employees (yourself not included).
One day, for whatever reason, you told both facilities to create the same game. You gave them the specifications for the game and the facilities create the game. Assuming the employees in West One and East One are all competent equally, then East One will finish the job faster because they have four extra personnel.
Now, back to the CPU. If the CPU is you (the CEO), and the cores are workers, then each core does one task. More cores mean that you can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
anthonio5636 :
I know the number of cores is important and so is the GHz but when I was looking at this website it seems that certain processors with lower GHz outperform processors with more GHz. E.G. Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz vs. Intel Core i5-4690K @ 3.50GHz.
Let's go back to my scenario above. If West One completes the task close to the time East One finishes the same task, then the extra four personnel in East One is doing a whole lot of nothing. Either that or West One's employees are more efficient and are better than East One. So in that regard, having more personnel (or cores) didn't help much. This is true in games that use upwards of two cores. in fact, many games do not use more than a few cores.
GHz is actually not important. At the very least, it's not conclusive. So if a CPU runs at 3.0 GHz and another CPU runs at 1.50 GHz, you would assume the CPU running at 3.0 GHz to be faster, right? That is not true. Let's say the CPU running at 3.0 GHz performs one task. The CPU running at 1.50 GHz performs two tasks. In this case, both CPUs are essentially identical. The first CPU is twice as fast, but it completes tasks in half the time. The terminology for this is Instructions per Cycle or IPC for short.
One thing I did not mention is Hyper-Threading. This is when one core performs two tasks at once. It's like multi-tasking for a single person. But of course, this is less efficient than having another physical body.
anthonio5636 :
Just finished doing some more reading on the subject and people have been talking about the "architecture" of the processor. If someone could explain what exactly that means as well I would greatly appreciate it.
A computer architecture is a list of instruction sets. How the CPU performs all the calculations. It's not like a human brain that can learn new things. Everything it has to do is programmed into it.
anthonio5636 :
Been looking at more processors and I've noticed something called an intergrated graphics core. I understand that this is basically like a built in graphics card but can I still get a dedicated graphics card to put in my computer as well?
Yes.
On a side note, if your primary goal is just gaming, looking into this much depth on CPU is not very useful. It doesn't hurt to know more about them, but CPUs don't do much in most games. There are CPU-intensive games where having a fast CPU matters, but most of the time, the GPU will be doing the work. You want to make sure that the CPU is not bottlenecking the GPU and vice-versa.
Bottlenecking is when something is restricting another thing from performing at full potential. So if the CPU is too slow to provide data to the graphics card, then the graphics card is under-performing because it is constantly waiting on the CPU.