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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pandemonium - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
It doesn't, because it doesn't exactly capture the dynamics of displaying several player models at once. It does a decent job at displaying several preprogrammed models at once.The FF benchmarks have been a fairly low estimation of actual game performance when it comes to more demanding instances of raids and large crowds. With that said, they do better than most other canned benchmarks for determining the performance of a machine. Given it's consistent testing environment, I guess it wouldn't hurt to use it as a go-to benchmark.
Tormeh - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
But where is the Civilization V end-of-turn benchmark? I don't care about the frame rates, I care about the times I'm staring at the screen waiting for the game to finish its calculations!defiler99 - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
I don't normally comment (as the reviews are generally excellent), but I was actually shocked to see the choice of graphics card(s) for this roundup. Nobody buying a gaming CPU is going to have stuff that slow, right? So many of the tests result in framerates under 60fps, etc.DPOverLord - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Be great to see this with the new 4930K, Titan @ 1600pdennphill - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Learn to write in the English language - or at least use the grammar checker. I wince reading this article. (But thanks for the effort. Content is OK)Hrel - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
I'm finally in the process of building a new desktop, mini-ITX. Gonna use a 4570S CPU. Primary duties will be media streaming but I'll game on it too. The computer it's replacing? 650i SLI chipset based computer running an E8400 Core 2 duo. I can still max out Mass Effect games with no issue. Minecraft maxes out the CPU but that's just because Java sucks. So that old 2007 era computer is still a viable gaming machine with the GTX460 in it. Talk of needing to replace a Nehalem CPU soon seems kind of absurd to me. But then again I have no interest in Far Cry or Crysis.markthema3 - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
What about The Witcher 2 for a benchmark? I have yet to see anything be more intense than that game's Ubersampling option.SeriousTodd - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
What are the disadvantages of buying a 4770K?Enterprise24 - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
Wanna see Total War Rome II in real time tactical mode (Probably the most CPU intensive game).boozzer - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
well damn. it seems like if I am single gpu gaming at 1080p, cpu doesn't matter much at all? a 5800k would do the job well enough.question: will aa amd 5800k bottleneck a gtx780? or a 290x? in 1080p. or it doesn't matter at all? since the resolution is so low. I am sure I am staying in 1080p for at least 5 more years. and my current pc parts are really old(c2d e8500 + 460 1gb) and thinking of upgrading. I am sure a 780 or 290x would last 5 or more years, so kinda want a matching cpu.