I would wager that the Logitech G400s I have is sufficient for any recreational gaming needs. I'm sure I could spend more on a mouse, but if you're the kind that wants a pretty no-nonsense mouse without a billion extra buttons, this is hard to beat. On the fly DPI adjust is cool... and it matches my G510s keyboard. If I was going for very hardcore gaming and wanted to optimize ALL THE MAPPINGS, where having a billion buttons is useful, then it would be perhaps underwhelming.
I assume you mean separate CPU and video card? AMD also markets desktop APU's that offer all-in-one graphics and processing. Considering one for a gaming HTPC build now that the new Kaveri chips are out. Newest generation shows marked improvement over previous, though they're still quite power-hungry.
Pretty sure the i7 series blows AMD out of the water, but the best ones are made expensive. The AMD FX series seems to be a popular choice.
The i5 is sufficient even for high end gaming. I have an i7, it and the CPU is definitely not the bottleneck in terms of gaming performance. The i7 only really helps me when I'm encoding a video for YouTube and such.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
I have i3 that has been fine. My biggest regret with it is that it's slightly too weak for Wii emulation. But for other gaming I've done it has been sufficient.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
I have i3 that has been fine. My biggest regret with it is that it's slightly too weak for Wii emulation. But for other gaming I've done it has been sufficient.
The i3 is quite restrictive for any higher end graphics cards (AMD 7000 or even some old higher end 6000's will be bottlenecked).
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
I have i3 that has been fine. My biggest regret with it is that it's slightly too weak for Wii emulation. But for other gaming I've done it has been sufficient.
The i3 is quite restrictive for any higher end graphics cards (AMD 7000 or even some old higher end 6000's will be bottlenecked).
Yeah, I don't attempt to emulate anything beyond PS2/N64 on my HTPC. Even then, I do that very little. It's mostly indie games from Steam, NES, SNES, and MAME.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
I have i3 that has been fine. My biggest regret with it is that it's slightly too weak for Wii emulation. But for other gaming I've done it has been sufficient.
The i3 is quite restrictive for any higher end graphics cards (AMD 7000 or even some old higher end 6000's will be bottlenecked).
That's more of a AMD problem than an nVidia problem from what I've read.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
The i3 is quite restrictive for any higher end graphics cards (AMD 7000 or even some old higher end 6000's will be bottlenecked).
Can I see evidence of this? While I do think certain games would run poorly on an i3, I suspect this would be the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, it wouldn't be "high end 3d graphics" that would give the i3 problems; certain games can be very CPU intensive but that typically isn't the reason why.
Regardless, I would generally suggest an i5 because for many purposes other than gaming it's a big deal, and for those few games where it can matter.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
The i3 is quite restrictive for any higher end graphics cards (AMD 7000 or even some old higher end 6000's will be bottlenecked).
Can I see evidence of this? While I do think certain games would run poorly on an i3, I suspect this would be the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, it wouldn't be "high end 3d graphics" that would give the i3 problems; certain games can be very CPU intensive but that typically isn't the reason why.
Regardless, I would generally suggest an i5 because for many purposes other than gaming it's a big deal, and for those few games where it can matter.
This article is one of the few well written ones from Toms Hardware. It is a few years old but the information is still relevant to the effect the number of CPU cores and their frequency has on a game's frame rate.
It is not an AMD problem specifically, it affects all graphics cards.
So many game engines check for multi-threading, now compared to 4 years ago. It is no longer "a few games" that benefit from CPU power and number of threads.
Also a bunch of of post or after effects plus anti-aliasing demand more CPU power.
In the article you linked, there was only one game where a quad-core was genuinely justified. Granted, that was 4 years ago, but I don't think it's at all self-evident that the performance of modern games would be severely restricted by an i3.
Of the twelve games listed, only the two at the bit-tech link are cases where I would class that Core i3 as a serious bottleneck. Moreover, despite being the bottleneck for Skyrim, the performance is still totally OK anyway, and so it comes down to only one of 12 games - Shogun 2: Total War - where the i3 isn't good enough to get good performance.
The previous-gen Core i3s were a little weaker, but the story is still generally the same - the performance is generally OK, and the story of them being a serious bottleneck still doesn't bear out in the data.
I'm not, by any means, saying that the Core i3 is perfectly fine across the board, and I definitely agree that the Core i5 is a better choice for a gaming CPU, but I think that it's important not to overstate how much impact the CPU has. Most of the time, for most real-world setups, the GPU is still going to be the primary bottleneck for gaming purposes.
For example, I would strongly suggest that you would get, on average, better performance with a Core i3-4130 + GTX 770 than you would with a Core i5-3670 + GTX 760; that said, if you need lots of CPU power for other reasons you'd be reasonably justified in getting the former over the latter. Of course, the better suggestion would be to spend more money, and get both the Core i5 and a better GPU as well.
If it's just gaming, you're fine with the i5 but if you're running lots of multi-threaded apps you can go with the i7.
Probably not required High end - i7 4960X
I think there are significant caveats to pretty much all of what you're saying here. In particular, I think putting forward an i7 as the representative of "mid range", compared against the thousand dollar i7 as "high end", is pretty skewed.
In terms of performance, I think the Core i5s easily count as "high end"; even the lowest of the modern Haswell i5s is fairly competitive with the older i7s, and even compared to the new Haswell i7s the performance difference really isn't particularly large. The difference between the i5-4670K and the i7-4770K is Hyper-Threading and a 3% bump in clock speed, and although Hyper-Threading genuinely does give a significant boost in some applications, you need proper justification to throw an extra $100 in there; and I agree with Rym that for pretty much everyone that justification isn't there.
If you get an i5-4670K, then compared to the i5-4570 you're paying an extra $40 for the unlocked multipliers, and a mere ~6% increase in clock speed. There's no way that 6% is worth the price on its own, so your suggestion makes an implicit and unstated assumption of overclocking, which most people aren't going to do. Besides, you can overclock even without the unlocked multipliers.
I have to assume that "probably not required" as applied to the i7-4960X is humor on your part, since adjectives like "pointless" or "masturbatory" are appropriate here.
I'm also skeptical of your budget suggestion of the A10-7700K - is it really worth the extra $60 over the A8-6600K or the Core i3-3240, or the extra $90 over the X4 750K, especially compared to putting that price differential into discrete GPU power? Given the stated concerns over CPU bottlenecking, it's important to note that it seems that the Core i3 actually tends to outperform AMD's quad cores for gaming purposes.
My recommendation is far simpler - get an i5-4570, or maybe an i5-4670K if you really want the unlocked multipliers. If you want an i7 you'd better have a good reason for it.
However, if you have little use for the performance, or if you don't want to spend ~$200 on the CPU, things get significantly more complicated. AMD has some cheap quad-cores, but Intel's cheapest dual-cores are actually quite solid.
This is my preference, if you want to tell Steve that he should buy an i3 for his next gaming rig go ahead.
The question was directed at CPU options for a gaming rig, no other information was given, I selected the chips that I would be looking for.
If I was personally buying I would have bought the i5 4670K because I use my desktop for multiple other purposes and I like to overclock.
I then also look at the motherboards and most of the times the overclock enthusiast boards are aimed at the high end Intel parts in which case I would usually shell out the extra $100 for thte 4770K.
On top of this I usually run an SLI or CF setup so I prefer if I have 2 PCI-e x 16 lanes.
Having said that I would still not consider and i3 for my main desktop.
As I stated several times, my own recommendation would generally be an i5 - I was merely responding to the suggestion that the i3 would be a serious bottleneck.
I can see that those suggestions represent what you yourself would buy, but I think that when you put them forth as suggestions to others you need to qualify them with your own reasoning.
I then also look at the motherboards and most of the times the overclock enthusiast boards are aimed at the high end Intel parts in which case I would usually shell out the extra $100 for thte 4770K.
You don't need an overclock enthusiast board to overclock, and I also don't see how this would justify the extra $100. Of course, it comes down to your preferences in the end.
I can see that those suggestions represent what you yourself would buy, but I think that when you put them forth as suggestions to others you need to qualify them with your own reasoning.
In some uses, a 6% increase in clock speed is a huge deal. Probably not anything you're doing, but nonetheless it can matter.
For example, financial software and high speed middleware. The sheer limiting factor on messaging throughput/latency, assuming disks and other bottlenecks are reasonably managed, is single-core clock speed.
For certain specialised applications, an old Pentium 4 will perform faster than the newest core i7.
In many cases I'd think the assumption that disks and other bottlenecks are reasonably managed is quite a large assumption.
That said, even in the presence of other bottlenecks, it's true that you will get overall improvements from higher clock speeds, and depending on the application it could easily be the case that a slight improvement in clock speed is worth a lot of money.
However, those kinds of applications aren't particularly relevant to this thread; after all, for many of these you probably wouldn't be building your own computer anyway, right?
For certain specialised applications, an old Pentium 4 will perform faster than the newest core i7.
That, I am highly skeptical of. I suspect that any such scenario would be contrived to the point of uselessness (e.g. the Pentium 4 beats the Core i7 in terms of the being-a-Pentium-4 metric).
First of all, even in terms of raw clock speed, modern i7s have in fact reached pretty much the same clock speeds as the fastest Pentium 4s - around the 3.8GHz mark. Besides that, different CPUs have very different capabilities with regards to what can be done in a single clock cycle, and this has continued to improve over generations of CPUs, due to factors like expansion of instruction sets and architectural improvements. Moreover, it's not just about the CPU; modern CPUs also have the huge advantage of being surrounded by modern architecture, which also means things like faster and higher-bandwidth memory access.
In some uses, a 6% increase in clock speed is a huge deal. Probably not anything you're doing, but nonetheless it can matter.
For example, financial software and high speed middleware. The sheer limiting factor on messaging throughput/latency, assuming disks and other bottlenecks are reasonably managed, is single-core clock speed.
For certain specialised applications, an old Pentium 4 will perform faster than the newest core i7.
I immediately noticed the reduction in response times while doing normal tasks in Windows and strategy games when I downclocked my CPU from 4.2 to 2.8 ghz.
I can't imagine how much clocks mean in pure computational software.
In other news, I overclocked my 4770K to 4.2GHz with no additional voltage. Unlocked multipliers are awesome!
You have the build that I'm making in my head if I had the money. The CPU that I would have ultimately chosen and either the GTX 770 or the 780.
What's Haswell like to overclock with? Finicky - Core 2 / Quad Core - Nehalem or easier?
I'd actually rate it on the finicky end. Mine blue screened after a while at 4.3 at stock voltage. Sure I could raise the voltage, but it gets so hot so fast. Stock voltage is 1.13v, and when testing it initially I didn't realize that the new AVX code in Prime95 27.9 was bumping the voltage to 1.23v. That 10% or so bump in voltage put the CPU well into CPU throttling with the stock heatsink and the Hyper EVO I installed could only just keep it running at the turbo speed of 3.9GHz. So with my air cooling solution, I doubt I could keep an overvolted and overclocked Haswell cool. They moved the voltage regulator onto the CPU die for better control, but it adds a lot of heat to dissipate. Also they didn't weld the CPU to the heatspreader like older CPUs, so the heat dissipation is less than ideal. So really it's water cooling or get out, and consider delidding the thing.
Personally, I paid for the unlocked multiplier so I'm just trying to get whatever extra performance I can get for free. :P The speed is fantastic even if it isn't the most amazing overclocker ever.
I'm at my wits end with my desktop build, so I turn to you all for help.
I don't get video. Will not post.
I am testing two different monitors with two different cables (Both using DVI), both of which worked on my previous desktop. No video on either.
I am testing RAM that worked on a previous computer.
Power supply is new, but my computer powers on AND STAYS ON. This means that power supply is running fine. Computer will stay on for minutes and minutes with no sign of problems.
Seeing as how PC stays on, it must be going into BIOS. There's nothing else it could do. BIOS requires processor, meaning processor must be working.
I have tested new graphics card and old, known to be working graphics card. Neither output video.
I replaced the motherboard when this problem first displayed itself. New motherboard still provides no video.
Cleared the CMOS, replaced things, trying out different tests for all the parts but it's looking like things pretty much pass.
What else could prevent video from being produced? I'm literally grasping at straws here.
Check your beep code situation. I think it should beep once as confirmation that it's passing POST.
If your CPU has built-in graphics, which most modern CPUs do, you should try doing that instead of using a dedicated video card; that should help a lot with isolating the issue.
The main possibility that comes to mind is that the video cards aren't being properly connected or powered. This could be an issue with the supply of extra power to the video card from the PSU, with the PCI express slot on the motherboard, or with the DVI output port.
It's also possible you're connecting something to the wrong port somewhere, e.g. the motherboard requires the video card to be in a specific PCI express slot, or you're using the wrong DVI port.
Comments
Pretty sure the i7 series blows AMD out of the water, but the best ones are made expensive. The AMD FX series seems to be a popular choice.
For non-serious gaming even an old i3 is sufficient. My HTPC has one, and it has no performance issues with any game that doesn't have high end 3d graphics.
Mid Range - Intel i7 4770k
$100 cheaper - Intel i5 4670k
If it's just gaming, you're fine with the i5 but if you're running lots of multi-threaded apps you can go with the i7.
Probably not required High end - i7 4960X
In 2009, the price point sweet spot was the i7-920. I haven't even considered a new PC yet, so I'm not sure what the current state is.
Regardless, I would generally suggest an i5 because for many purposes other than gaming it's a big deal, and for those few games where it can matter.
It is not an AMD problem specifically, it affects all graphics cards.
This is the second part of the article and the conclusions.
So many game engines check for multi-threading, now compared to 4 years ago. It is no longer "a few games" that benefit from CPU power and number of threads.
Also a bunch of of post or after effects plus anti-aliasing demand more CPU power.
I do agree that a better CPU will add gaming power, but the key question is, how much? I looked for some benchmarks of the newest Core i3, and here's what I found:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/intel-core-i3-4340-review/
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-4340-4330-4130_5.html#sect0
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/11/14/intel-core-i3-4130-haswell-review/5
Of the twelve games listed, only the two at the bit-tech link are cases where I would class that Core i3 as a serious bottleneck. Moreover, despite being the bottleneck for Skyrim, the performance is still totally OK anyway, and so it comes down to only one of 12 games - Shogun 2: Total War - where the i3 isn't good enough to get good performance.
The previous-gen Core i3s were a little weaker, but the story is still generally the same - the performance is generally OK, and the story of them being a serious bottleneck still doesn't bear out in the data.
I'm not, by any means, saying that the Core i3 is perfectly fine across the board, and I definitely agree that the Core i5 is a better choice for a gaming CPU, but I think that it's important not to overstate how much impact the CPU has. Most of the time, for most real-world setups, the GPU is still going to be the primary bottleneck for gaming purposes.
For example, I would strongly suggest that you would get, on average, better performance with a Core i3-4130 + GTX 770 than you would with a Core i5-3670 + GTX 760; that said, if you need lots of CPU power for other reasons you'd be reasonably justified in getting the former over the latter. Of course, the better suggestion would be to spend more money, and get both the Core i5 and a better GPU as well.
In terms of performance, I think the Core i5s easily count as "high end"; even the lowest of the modern Haswell i5s is fairly competitive with the older i7s, and even compared to the new Haswell i7s the performance difference really isn't particularly large. The difference between the i5-4670K and the i7-4770K is Hyper-Threading and a 3% bump in clock speed, and although Hyper-Threading genuinely does give a significant boost in some applications, you need proper justification to throw an extra $100 in there; and I agree with Rym that for pretty much everyone that justification isn't there.
If you get an i5-4670K, then compared to the i5-4570 you're paying an extra $40 for the unlocked multipliers, and a mere ~6% increase in clock speed. There's no way that 6% is worth the price on its own, so your suggestion makes an implicit and unstated assumption of overclocking, which most people aren't going to do. Besides, you can overclock even without the unlocked multipliers.
I have to assume that "probably not required" as applied to the i7-4960X is humor on your part, since adjectives like "pointless" or "masturbatory" are appropriate here.
I'm also skeptical of your budget suggestion of the A10-7700K - is it really worth the extra $60 over the A8-6600K or the Core i3-3240, or the extra $90 over the X4 750K, especially compared to putting that price differential into discrete GPU power? Given the stated concerns over CPU bottlenecking, it's important to note that it seems that the Core i3 actually tends to outperform AMD's quad cores for gaming purposes.
My recommendation is far simpler - get an i5-4570, or maybe an i5-4670K if you really want the unlocked multipliers. If you want an i7 you'd better have a good reason for it.
However, if you have little use for the performance, or if you don't want to spend ~$200 on the CPU, things get significantly more complicated. AMD has some cheap quad-cores, but Intel's cheapest dual-cores are actually quite solid.
The question was directed at CPU options for a gaming rig, no other information was given, I selected the chips that I would be looking for.
If I was personally buying I would have bought the i5 4670K because I use my desktop for multiple other purposes and I like to overclock.
I then also look at the motherboards and most of the times the overclock enthusiast boards are aimed at the high end Intel parts in which case I would usually shell out the extra $100 for thte 4770K.
On top of this I usually run an SLI or CF setup so I prefer if I have 2 PCI-e x 16 lanes.
Having said that I would still not consider and i3 for my main desktop.
I can see that those suggestions represent what you yourself would buy, but I think that when you put them forth as suggestions to others you need to qualify them with your own reasoning. You don't need an overclock enthusiast board to overclock, and I also don't see how this would justify the extra $100. Of course, it comes down to your preferences in the end.
For example, financial software and high speed middleware. The sheer limiting factor on messaging throughput/latency, assuming disks and other bottlenecks are reasonably managed, is single-core clock speed.
For certain specialised applications, an old Pentium 4 will perform faster than the newest core i7.
That said, even in the presence of other bottlenecks, it's true that you will get overall improvements from higher clock speeds, and depending on the application it could easily be the case that a slight improvement in clock speed is worth a lot of money.
However, those kinds of applications aren't particularly relevant to this thread; after all, for many of these you probably wouldn't be building your own computer anyway, right? That, I am highly skeptical of. I suspect that any such scenario would be contrived to the point of uselessness (e.g. the Pentium 4 beats the Core i7 in terms of the being-a-Pentium-4 metric).
First of all, even in terms of raw clock speed, modern i7s have in fact reached pretty much the same clock speeds as the fastest Pentium 4s - around the 3.8GHz mark. Besides that, different CPUs have very different capabilities with regards to what can be done in a single clock cycle, and this has continued to improve over generations of CPUs, due to factors like expansion of instruction sets and architectural improvements. Moreover, it's not just about the CPU; modern CPUs also have the huge advantage of being surrounded by modern architecture, which also means things like faster and higher-bandwidth memory access.
I can't imagine how much clocks mean in pure computational software.
The CPU that I would have ultimately chosen and either the GTX 770 or the 780.
What's Haswell like to overclock with?
Finicky - Core 2 / Quad Core - Nehalem or easier?
Personally, I paid for the unlocked multiplier so I'm just trying to get whatever extra performance I can get for free. :P The speed is fantastic even if it isn't the most amazing overclocker ever.
The sensitivity to changes in voltages in newer parts is a major detriment it seems.
I can't understand why the heatspreader wouldn't be optimally attached to the CPU.
All my cooling stuff is aimed at air cooling as well.
I don't get video. Will not post.
I am testing two different monitors with two different cables (Both using DVI), both of which worked on my previous desktop. No video on either.
I am testing RAM that worked on a previous computer.
Power supply is new, but my computer powers on AND STAYS ON. This means that power supply is running fine. Computer will stay on for minutes and minutes with no sign of problems.
Seeing as how PC stays on, it must be going into BIOS. There's nothing else it could do. BIOS requires processor, meaning processor must be working.
I have tested new graphics card and old, known to be working graphics card. Neither output video.
I replaced the motherboard when this problem first displayed itself. New motherboard still provides no video.
Cleared the CMOS, replaced things, trying out different tests for all the parts but it's looking like things pretty much pass.
What else could prevent video from being produced? I'm literally grasping at straws here.
Edit: Let me try and compile a parts list...
Mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130637
Processor: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284
Power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171079
Graphics card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150692
RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231489 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231314
If your CPU has built-in graphics, which most modern CPUs do, you should try doing that instead of using a dedicated video card; that should help a lot with isolating the issue.
The main possibility that comes to mind is that the video cards aren't being properly connected or powered. This could be an issue with the supply of extra power to the video card from the PSU, with the PCI express slot on the motherboard, or with the DVI output port.
It's also possible you're connecting something to the wrong port somewhere, e.g. the motherboard requires the video card to be in a specific PCI express slot, or you're using the wrong DVI port.