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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Harry Lloyd - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I am sorry to say that, but I never expected to see a completely useless test at AnandTech. 99% of singleplayer games are fine with a Core i3, 99.9% of all games are fine with a stock Core i5, but there is that 0.1 % that is not, and it is mostly multiplayer.Go look at the BF4 beta tests, where even a Haswell i7 is a bottleneck. Even BF3 muliplayer performs better with a modern i5 than with a 1156/1366 CPU.
And with next-gen games right around the corner, the situation might change drastically with more and more games needing a very fast quad core CPU.
Dribble - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Agree. What's the point of running time demos (need less cpu grunt) on single player games (need less cpu grunt) at very high res/settings (gpu bound max fps) with no min fps (so weak cpu bottlenecks hidden).Makes those with weak cpu's feel better and leads to lots of "surprising my AMD processor is good enough" comments, but it actually for many people it's not.
just4U - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Personally I'd say that's a load of BS. I work with a lot of different setups, and unless your an enthusiast the average gamer really can't tell the difference. Their coming off of older setups already so unless your cutting a ton of corners you can easily go the AMD route for a good majority of them.glugglug - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I don't understand the recommendation for "at least quad core" for Civilization V.Having looked at task manager during the game, it quickly becomes apparent that the game is effectively entirely single threaded. It doesn't even have a separate thread for video rendering vs. AI, or if it does, they completely block each other. Setting the CPU affinity to keep the game on a single core makes absolutely no difference in that game.
JPForums - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I've got to say, I'm impressed with the common sense approach, both to the setup of a benchmark of this size, and some of the conclusions I'm reading.
I'm interested to see how many AMD processor's end up above the "good enough to not bottleneck the GPU setup" line. I wonder if they will be cost effective vs and Intel setup.
A future experiment of interest to me is whether or not more budget oriented chipsets significantly hinder performance. I guess the question that's on my mind is "Is there any situation in which a faster processor on a board with lesser capabilities would be outperformed by a (somewhat) slower processor on a board with greater capabilities?" Or put a different way, "How much processing power is it logical to sacrifice in pursuit of a better platform (I.E. more PCIe lanes for multiGPU setups)?"
KaarlisK - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Could you please test a Haswell Pentium? In comparison to the i3, it has only slight lower frequency, but no HT, and is way cheaper.ShieTar - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I second this request. From the limited amount of tests I could find so far it seems that saving money on the CPU and investing it into the GPU is the way to go for most games. That seems to include even seemingly unbalanced combinations like a Pentium and a GTX 780 beating a Quad-Core and a GTX 770.Flunk - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I was quite surprised to see the Sandy Bridge chips hanging in there. There doesn't seem to be much need to upgrade if you have a i5-2500K or i7-2600k, especially if you factor in how easy they are to overclock for 4.5Ghz and sometimes beyond.just4U - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Wasn't much of a bump for ivyB or Haswell really.. Put all three on a table ("STOCK") /w similar hardware and I'd lay money on 99.9% not being able to tell the difference. CPU's have been going sideways in performance rather than upwards. (My opinion..) for sometime now.What's interesting is Socket1366 cpu's are finally beginning to show some age..
A5 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Performance hasn't been increasing (as much) because of the focus on power consumption in laptops. That and AMD's utterly noncompetitive products at the high end.I could 100% tell you which system was which if I had a Kill-A-Watt, though.