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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BOMBOVA - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
This article, prompted me to pull my P6T Asus mb out and replace it with a MSI 7666 which holds the 1366 I7 chip, i put in a 960 over my 920 , and clocked it up to 3.8x so far, and with my Nvidia 470 gpu, n raid 0 2x120 Gbyte ssd's things are rocking along, really good, it seems compared to the high end stuff presented here. , i had to install a cheap Syba controller card, on the Marvell chip set, set to 32 kbits, over 64 kbs, better data storage efficiency over speed, n a 4 channel usb 3.0 card, and it is good to go. , since i bought good , near new , used, i am in it for say half, price. and it works for me, i had a tough go, with microsoft critical patch updates. flooded on oct. 8th, n 15th. so my system restore points, crashed, , i am now set on NO automatic downloads, and all is good, " this is like a 3 day experience " i don't want to go through again, , enjoyed the article, and comments. good comments, thanks guys and girls. and am looking for the DD$4 stuff n Haswell super processor of 14, or early 15, now on to doing work with my computer :) , Cheers, all , have fun with candies, next, and have a good Xmas, buy yourselves something nice. lets keep america working, rtg. Vancouver CanadaWHISP - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Your review is talking about recommendations based on # of GPU's but seems to make the assumption GPU = graphics card. I have a GTX 690 and am looking to possibly upgrade my cpu/mobo, what would your recommendation be keeping in mind in the future I may buy another gtx690 to boost performance? What CPU PLX or non PLX combo do I need to satisfy two 690's in sli?Gastec - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
You don't need PLX with dual-SLI, you don't even need a second GTX 690 :P I myself would never ever consider spending so much money on a video card, but I guess you play on multiple 30'' monitors with the maximum available resolution. Each with it's own. If you insist, then get the Intel i7-4960X, a socket 2011 X79 Asus motherboard with a PLX chip on it and 3 Nvidia GTX Titan. That would surely give you at least 150 FPS in any game except those that are specifically designed not to give more than what the designers want, like Crysis.Gastec - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
I'm on a i7-860 since 2010 and HT was also a decision factor for buying it. But over the years I don't think HT has helped me that much with what I did and do on the PC. So now, after reading this article -which is very helpful- I think a i5-4670(K) with it's $100 lower price difference will suffice. Unless...upcoming games like The Elder Scrolls Online(that I want to play) will make use of HT, but I don't think so. Does anyone know of any game that makes good use of Hyper-Threading, or at least 4 cores?BlackOmega - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Goddammit. 6 years I spent without upgrading my rig, now I come back to anandtech and I can't understand one a single one of those benchmarks.Hell, WHERE ARE THE CPU CLOCK SPEEDS? How the hell Intel and AMD expect me to understand this gibberish the use to name their processors, I want to compare IPC on every bench I see, I want to see em every test how the ghz of one CPU compares to another. I'm not going to read those benchs with a cpu dictionary trying to interpret every name on this list, nor have I a good enough memory to remember what CPU have more cache ou clock speed than the other as described in the first page.
6 years I stood away from the hardware scene, now I came back and I can't understand anything.
/frustrated
BlackOmega - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
ps: AMD and Intel naming scheme suck, give us back clock speed.oranos - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
2500k best value gaming processor of all time :)