Choosing a Gaming CPU October 2013: i7-4960X, i5-4670K, Nehalem and Intel Update
by Ian Cutress on October 3, 2013 10:05 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
Civ5 seems to love IPC, with our Haswell and Ivy-E CPUs all near the top. All our PCIe 3.0 combinations hit 80 FPS or above.
Two 7970s
On multiple AMD GPUs the PCIe 3.0 combiantions get the biggest boost, along with anything using a PLX or NF200 chip to boost lane allocations. There seems to be a barrier around 100-108 FPS that only Haswell and Ivy Bridge CPUs are moving over, except the one 990X result. The i7-4960X takes top spot, and the i7-920 is 45 FPS behind - almost 1/3. The i5-4430 is lower than expected, showing little scaling after the first GPU.
Three 7970s
Civ5 has terrible scaling behond one GPU let alone two, meaning most of our tri-GPU results are similar to dual GPU. Again, anything purely PCIe 3.0 seems to get the biggest boost, with the 4670K still fighting alongside the 4770K.
One 580
For a single GTX 580 the top spots above 80 FPS are all on the side of Sandy Bridge and above, with Nehalem scoring below this marker. It seems that dual core CPUs take a bashing, suggesting a quad core minimum.
Two 580s
More NVIDIA GPUs for Civ5 means more cores and more lanes where possible, with the i7-4960X taking the top spot. This is almost 40 FPS higher than the i5-4430 and the Nehalem CPUs. The 4670K doesn't miss a beat against the i7-4770K.
Civilization V Conclusion
We see some of our biggest variations in CPU performance in Civilization V, where it is clear that a modern Intel processor (Ivy/Haswell), at least quad core, is needed to get the job done for the higher frame rates. Arguably any high-end AMD processor will perform >60 FPS in our testing here as well, perhaps making the point moot. For single CPU, the i5-4430 performs well in Civ5, though in dual GPU the i5-4670K might be a better investment.
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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?