re: Build the Best Gaming PC Your Money Can Buy: A Detailed Guide (Updated Sep 2014)

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++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
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====What Kind of CPU Will You Need to Avoid a Bottleneck?====
For most games, not much, as the GPU is the primary source of processing power. That’s the short answer. A better answer is “It depends.” Look at these results published by The Tech Report (techreport.com) in 2012. They tested 18 different CPUs on 4 popular games using a Radeon 7950 (a fairly high-end card, as you already know).

First, let’s look at Batman: Arkham City, a GPU-dominant game with a lot of physics involvement. It’s also a game known for being poorly coded for PC.



Most of these CPUs are a bit dated, and I’ll add up front that the CPUs I will suggest for the sample budgets will have performance levels around the 2400–3570K in gaming.

To put things into perspective, the top CPU in that chart (the i7-3960X) is a $1,000 CPU, and the one right below it, i7-3770K, is a $300 CPU. Go down two rungs to the i5-3570K, and you have a $200 CPU. While those expensive CPUs are incredible pieces of hardware for other applications, they just don’t have much of an added benefit in PC games.

The Tech Report’s test also measured frame times (frame latency), which showed improvements in direct correlation with frame rate performance (i.e., the better CPUs had higher FPS and lower frame latency). I mentioned frame latency briefly in an earlier section. To read more about it, check out these links: Extremetech article and Tech Report article

Now, let’s look at the results from a notoriously CPU-dependent game, Skyrim, including a similar test conducted by Tom’s Hardware:



Tom’s Hardware used settings that are more aggressive and tested weaker CPUs, which seemed to cause a disparity between the top-end CPUs and some of the lower end chips, including the i3-2100.

Next up, we have the results from Crysis 2. The Crysis series are known for their GPU-intensive engines. At amped up settings, they’ll bring even the strongest GPU to its knees.



The Crysis 2 results are interesting, given that the CPUs ranging from $200 to $1,000 have virtually zero performance difference in such a GPU-intensive game. Now, look at Battlefield 3 (single player). The performance is nearly identical across every CPU.



The multiplayer mode of Battlefield 3 is far more CPU-intensive, however, due to the dynamic environment, and the fact that you can have up to 64 players at once in a server (requiring lots of real-time physics calculations).

Have you noticed something about all of these results? The Intel CPUs come out on top. Every single time. As I said, Intel’s architecture in those CPUs allow for far better performance per core. This still holds true in today’s CPUs despite AMD’s improved architecture. Tests are showing Intel’s i5-4670K ($220) outperforms AMD’s FX-8350 by nearly 50% in single-core performance. However, the 8350 (an 8-core CPU) is slightly ahead of the 4670K (a quad-core CPU with no hyperthreading) in multi-threaded applications. Basically, the more threads an application uses, the less of a performance advantage the 4670K will have over the 8350.

So, what does that have to do with gaming? Right now, not much. Many games are single-threaded (meaning, they only send one set of instructions to the CPU at a time), and even the multi-threaded games are only using 3 to 4 threads at a time to process in parallel. Therefore, multi-threaded games are not even using all 8 of the AMD FX-8350’s cores for there to be any advantage.

So what this ultimately translates to is negligible performance differences between these two CPUs for gaming. This is obvious for GPU-dependent games, but even in CPU-intensive games, the GPU is still doing enough work to make up for a lot of the difference in per-core performance between the two.

There are some who may argue that the next generation of consoles will bring more games coded for 8 cores—the reason being, the new consoles have 8-core CPUs. To be honest, I don’t see that happening in the near future. It’s been stated in numerous articles that the 8-core Jaguar CPU shipping with the consoles is a weak one, amounting to only about half of the performance of an FX-8350. It’s likely at least half of the cores will be devoted to the operating system and processes that must constantly run in the background. That essentially leaves a disproportionately weak quad-core CPU for gaming, meaning that coding games to take advantage of GPU power will still be important, perhaps even more important than ever.

However, I’m not saying that games won’t be coded to use more threads. On the contrary, since the console CPU is so weak, taking advantage of multi-threading will also be important, and this will certainly extend to benefit multi-core utilization on PCs as well. But this is good news for anyone with a modern PC, and especially great news for anyone planning to build one. This can mean more GPU-intensive games coupled with optimized code to take better advantage of any multi-threaded CPU.