Choosing a Gaming CPU October 2013: i7-4960X, i5-4670K, Nehalem and Intel Update
by Ian Cutress on October 3, 2013 10:05 AM ESTDirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Dirt 3 also falls under the list of ‘games with a handy benchmark mode’. In previous testing, Dirt 3 has always seemed to love cores, memory, GPUs, PCIe lane bandwidth, everything. The small issue with Dirt 3 is that depending on the benchmark mode tested, the benchmark launcher is not indicative of game play per se, citing numbers higher than actually observed. Despite this, the benchmark mode also includes an element of uncertainty, by actually driving a race, rather than a predetermined sequence of events such as Metro 2033. This in essence should make the benchmark more variable, but we take repeated in order to smooth this out. Using the benchmark mode, Dirt 3 is run at 1440p with Ultra graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
One 7970
Similar to Metro, pure dual core CPUs seem best avoided when pushing a high resolution with a single GPU. The Haswell CPUs seem to be near the top due to their IPC advantage.
Two 7970s
When running dual AMD GPUs only the top AMD chips seem to click on to the tail of Intel, with the hex-core CPUs taking top spots. Again there's no real change moving from 4670K to 4770K, and even the Nehalem CPUs keep up within 4% of the top spots
Three 7970s
At three GPUs the 4670K seems to provide the equivalent grunt to the 4770K, though more cores and more lanes seems to be the order of the day. Moving from a hybrid CPU/PCH x8/x8 + x4 lane allocation to a pure CPU allocation (x8/x4/x4) merits a 30 FPS rise in itself. The Nehalem CPUs, without NF200 support, seem to be on the back foot performing worse than Piledriver.
One 580
On the NVIDIA side, one GPU performs similarly across the board in our test.
Two 580s
When it comes to dual NVIDIA GPUs, ideally the latest AMD architecture and anything above a dual core Intel Sandy Bridge processor is enough to hit 100 FPS.
Dirt3 Conclusion
Our big variations occured on the AMD GPU side where it was clear that above two GPUs that perhaps moving from Nehalem might bring a boost to frame rates. The 4670K is still on par with the 4770K in our testing, and the i5-4430 seemed to be on a similar line most of the way but was down a peg on tri-GPU.
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Ranger101 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Every time an article of this sort is written, the conclusion is the same. In the vast majority of cases, due to GPU bottlenecks, the performance differences between CPUs are so minimal that no-one would notice the difference in game. Yawn.This is the 3rd time I am posting this comment as it seems to be continually removed. Yet it is a legitimate and non offensive comment. What happened to freedom of expression at Anandtech?
Flunk - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I'm seeing all three of your postsdingetje - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
would be nice to see how the haswell pentiums (like the g3420) do as low budget low power gaming cpu.too bad none of the review sites so far have deemed them worthy of a review so far.
geok1ng - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
"Of course we would suggest Haswell over Ivy Bridge based on Haswell being that newer platform."If only Haswell OCs were equal to IB OCs. With Haswell you are STUCK at 4.2-4.6Ghz, depending on your luck, and going water wont help. With IB 4.4-5.0Ghz in usual, and the more money you invest in cooling , the better will be your OC. This luck of the draw in Haswell, and the walls in OCing at Z87 should be considered, especially at triple and quad GPU builds aiming at 4k gaming, where a bad overclock is the doom of the entire system.
coachingjoy - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
good job, like your work.meliketrolls - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Of course AMD CPUs will have better scores. It's just that... AMD is WAAAAY better than Intel.R-Type - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I have a Dell XPS 420 with Q6600. With the 8800GT (512 MB) card I was getting about 40 fps with medium settings. When I upgraded to a GTX 670, I got about 60 FPS with high settings, a very noticeable improvement. In my experience, a quad core Q6600 is still a pretty competent gamer with a strong graphics card on all but the most extreme games.R3dox - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I'm one of those with a D0 i7 920 and it's been running at 3.8GHz (19x200bclk with 'only' 1600C9 memory, 12GB) for over 4 years. I suppose I'll just have to wait for a nice native PCIe SSD to avoid the old SATA controller and I'm golden for a good while more. It's just my HD6970 that could use replacement at some point (1920x1200 reso, nothing crazy).BOMBOVA - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
for my x58, i put in one of these "" SYBA SI-PEX40057 PCI-Express 2.0 "" fifty bucks, makes the newer ssd's rock, i am still happy with my platform and video work, and jpg work, is flash twice as good. " we love our i7-920"s " Cheers, good thread this, all power users, / good funR3dox - Sunday, October 6, 2013 - link
When I upgraded to my current intel 520( due to being 3x bigger than previous ssd), I looked into such cards but they were pretty bad and except for sequencial 128kb read, slower than the intel sata controller. I see this is a new version of the marvell controller but is it actually comparable to an intel sata 3 controller this time?