Choosing a Gaming CPU: Single + Multi-GPU at 1440p, April 2013
by Ian Cutress on May 8, 2013 10:00 AM ESTCivilization V
A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. We test at 1440p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.
One 7970
Civilization V is the first game where we see a gap when comparing processor families. A big part of what makes Civ5 perform at the best rates seems to be PCIe 3.0, followed by CPU performance – our PCIe 2.0 Intel processors are a little behind the PCIe 3.0 models. By virtue of not having a PCIe 3.0 AMD motherboard in for testing, the bad rap falls on AMD until PCIe 3.0 becomes part of their main game.
Two 7970s
The power of PCIe 3.0 is more apparent with two 7970 GPUs, however it is worth noting that only processors such as the i5-2500K and above have actually improved their performance with the second GPU. Everything else stays relatively similar.
Three 7970s
More cores and PCIe 3.0 are winners here, but no GPU configuration has scaled above two GPUs.
Four 7970s
Again, no scaling.
One 580
While the top end Intel processors again take the lead, an interesting point is that now we have all PCIe 2.0 values for comparison, the non-hyper threaded 2500K takes the top spot, 10% higher than the FX-8350.
Two 580s
We have another Intel/AMD split, by virtue of the fact that none of the AMD processors scaled above the first GPU. On the Intel side, you need at least an i5-2500K to see scaling, similar to what we saw with the 7970s.
Civilization V conclusion
Intel processors are the clear winner here, though not one stands out over the other. Having PCIe 3.0 seems to be the positive point for Civilization V, but in most cases scaling is still out of the window unless you have a monster machine under your belt.
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TheInternal - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
You honestly would be fine running most games at that rez with a single 670. After a driver install, I forgot to turn SLI back on for like a week and didn't really notice much of a difference in most of my games. Two of most high end cards, from what I continue to hear on forums, can easily power three 1080p monitors at high settings as well. I've not been able to find much information for two and three card setups powering three 1440p or higher res monitors though.nvalhalla - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link
Request: I've seen a few sites do these and they always use a large GPU. I understand removing the GPU from the equation, focus on the CPUs, but I would like to see these tests done with a 7770. If I'm dropping $1000+ on GPUs, I'm not thinking about buying an $80 CPU. A great question I haven't seen answered is how much CPU do I need for a normal mid-range card? If I am looking to get a mid-range GPU, do I need an i5 3570k? Would an x2 555 provide the same gaming performance? A what point does spending more on the CPU stop providing an improvement in performance?khanov - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link
Thanks for the article, interesting read.I'd like to suggest putting the i7 3820 in to the next article. The 3960x and 3930k are both 6 core CPU's, making platform comparison with all the other quad core's in the article more difficult.
Certainly you should retain the 6 core CPU's so we can see their potential, but adding the 3820 would allow for direct comparison of the X79 platform vs other platforms when all are running a quad core CPU.
steve_rogers42 - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
Hi Ian, fantastic article, has led me to rethink a lot of things, especially the scaling at work due to PCI-E 3.0 and price performance for low end systems. Seems that low-mid cpu and decent gpu is still the way to roll for future builds.Dont know if it would be possible but it would be interested to see the difference between an SR-2 and an SR-X especially considering the PCI-E 3.0 and move to newer cpu architecture.
Be also nice to see a 980x or 990x x58 or a q6600 to see the benefits of moving up from c2q/d to core i... But you probably don't have time :)
Again great article, has made me rethink original thoughts on AMD's 8350 and the caliber of Anandtech' comment's...
Cheers from Australia.
pandemonium - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
I haven't even read the entire article yet, but I can tell it's going to be awesome due to the outlying thoroughness on the first page.Thank you so very much for going well beyond what other reviewers do by just reporting a single run for each setup without delving deeper into the "why". Truly noble; and I would say you can honestly call yourself a scientist. :)
Sabresiberian - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
I think anyone reading this article thoroughly will come away with a better sense of how multidimensional the questions about which mainboard, CPU, and GPU to buy are. It isn't just a matter of looking at a few 2D graphs and picking the top solution (though that might serve to get you in the ballpark of what you want).Once again, I come away better educated and with more of a sense of what is going on with hardware combinations. Well done, and thanks! I'm looking forward to more of this type about these subjects.
smuff3758 - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
Well said. Finally, a simple thank you.LaxerFL - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
I'd like to see an i7-3820 in action, since I have one in this rig right now! I ran the PoVRay benchmark to see where it placed and scored 1626.25. I've OCed my cpu to 4.6Ghz though but I'd still like to see where a stock 3820 places in these benchmarks. I'm also interested to know if Quad Channel memory makes any difference...Great article! Keep it up, I look forward to seeing more results.
SuperVeloce - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
Why is there no E6700 on some of the graphs? E6400 in biblically underpowered and under-cached, we already knew that. Quad would be a better comparison anyways, as many still have them for games and productivity. And another thing... is pci-e 1.1 playing any role with those core2duo bad fps numbers? Why not use a P45 or sth with pci-e 2.0?guskline - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link
Why didn't you use the GTX680? Comparing a Radeon 7970 to a GTX580? Please!