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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Democrab - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
It's not really representative of most games, everyone knows it's highly CPU limited...Most games are GPU limited as proven by this, yet a lot of people seem unaware of that.Spoelie - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Another choice I was considering for gaming: the i5 3350p.This is the cheapest i5 available on this side of the pond and still Ivy, so it allows the 4 bin overclocking. Since haswell, intel does not allow any overclocking anymore for non-K parts.
In addition, Z77 motherboards are quite a bit cheaper than Z87 for the moment.
So for a 30$+ cheaper than the 4430, you get 3.7/3.6/3.6/3.5ghz Ivy vs 3.2/3.0ghz Haswell.
The platform isn't that upgradeable but with Intel moving to 2-year cadences for desktop upgrades, the performance should stay relevant for at least 4 years...
mrdude - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Amazing article, Ian. Thanks a ton.It's shocking to see how well the dual core Intel parts and the two-module AMD chips fare, even at 1440p with a single GPU. With respect to single-GPU gaming, opting to pull some $ out of the CPU/MB fund in order to buy a better GPU is certainly more advisable.
Those who invested in the X58/1366 platform certainly got their money's worth. Frankly, even buying a secondhand 1366 platform is a good idea if it's cheaper than a new quad-core 1155/1150 + mobo. Going from an SSD running on 3GB/s to 6GB/s really isn't noticeable. I've done this twice on two separate platforms and the only difference I've seen is with respect to bootup speed.
You also have to figure that this graph will change with the newer generation of console ports. I have an inclining that 2/4 threads might stumble a bit with some more demanding titles. We might even see AVX play a more significant role as well
cbrownx88 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
BF4 is gonna bump me from X58 I believe... way more CPU bound than BF3 (1920x1200@4.2ghz)snouter - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
BF4 makes my 4930k work more than I thought it would.BOMBOVA - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
i am reviving my x58 MSI board, with Syba sata 3 controller, and i really notice a difference on my long video editing files. that was my whole point of modding up. Cheers. good discussionchizow - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I really appreciated what this article tried to accomplish, and I think it does shed some light on some aspects of what you were trying to test...but someone at AnandTech couldn't throw you a bone and get you a pair of higher-end GPUs to test? 580s are a bit long in the tooth to garner any meaningful results. Maybe Gigabyte could have kicked a pair of 680s to you?Also, it would have been nice to see some Battlefield 3 results, since it is widely touted as a title that scales extremely well with both CPU (and shows big differences with HT) and GPU, especially in MultiPlayer, and will be especially relevant in the next few months as Battlefield 4 launches.
dusk007 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I find testing for CPU performance is not a strong suit of reviewers. The test has lots of data but it is missing the situations that gamers end up in which do require CPU performance.Starcraft 2. Just run a replay of an 8 player map at 4x-8x speed and most dual core notebooks practically break down.
Total War set unit size to epic and run some huge battle. That is where this games is great but it drains cpu resources like crazy.
Shooters or racing games are examples where the CPU has to do nothing but feed the GPU which is really the least CPU intensive stuff. Mulitplayer adds quite a bit of overhead but it is still not something if you play you need to worry much about your CPU.
When testing CPU performance kick all those shooters to the curve and focus on RTS games with huge unit sizes.
It is the minimum frames at these games that require CPU performance. The situations where it gets annoying that in the biggest battles the CPU cannot keep up. Starcraft 2 on medium runs on almost any GPU but it can bring slower CPU quickly to its limits.
IanCutress - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
COH2 is planned for our next benchmark update to cover the RTS side. I know Rome II is also a possibility, assuming we can get a good benchmark together. As I mentioned, if possible I'd like to batch file it up so I can work on other things rather than moderate a 5 minute benchmark (x4 for repetitions for a single number, x4-8 for GPU configs to complete a CPU analysis, x25+ CPUs for scope).If you have any other suggestions for the 2014 update, please let me know - email address is in the article (or click on my name at the top).
Ian
anubis44 - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
"COH2 is planned for our next benchmark update to cover the RTS side."Excellent. This is one of my most-played games. In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if subsequent patches for this game didn't noticeably improve it's multi-threaded performance, so having older results will be nice to have once these patches are released in order to track the improvements.