Core i5 2500K is a gaming beast

[Pemalite]

Ganoncrotch said:

JRPGfan said:

Actually the jump in terms of performance for something like a Haswell chip is much higher than a sandybridge, mhz for mhz.

You might see a 3.8ghz haswell beat a 5ghz Sandybridge chip, for something like Dolphine (wii emulation).

Something like a G3258 @4.5ghz (dual core) is enough to run ANY game for dolphine 100% fluently (even with custom graphics patches) for the most demanding games. Same is true for Pcsx2, or any other emulator currently worth running.

You dont even need a i7 currently for emulation, a cheap g3258 will handle things handly.

Is this post pointing out that a chip from 2014 (g3258) is more efficient than one from 2009 (i7 family)? I'm not sure if I'm reading this wrong.

I would like to see data backing up that claim of a 3.8ghz Haswell chip beating a 5ghz Sandy chip.

My own testing has shown that Haswell can equal Sandy whilst being clocked about 600-800mhz lower depending on task. (I know Haswell can shift into another gear in SSE/AVX heavy stuff... But still.)
Sandy also overclocks higher most of the time.
I would pick a 5ghz Sandy over a 4ghz Haswell every single day if Performance is your primary need.

Also... Problem with any non Hyper-threaded Dual-core is that there are games which will *refuse* to function on them at all, always cringed at people recommending Pentiums because of that fact.

Kirin_gaming said:

Locknuts said:

I've been hoping the Jaguar chips in the consoles would force devs to learn to code multithreaded software. It seems to be flowing over to the PC side, just really slowly. Probably because a good dual core can still easily outperform the 8 core CPUs in the consoles doing the same tasks.

I was hoping for that too, but like you said the adoption of multithread usage has been pretty stagnant.Some games, if I'm not mistaken have been using up to 6 cores, but I don't think it uses all 12 threads.AMD's Zen CPUs will have a 16 core, 32 thread version, supposedly releasing this year, and Intel's 6960X will probably be a 16 core CPU also, maybe even 18, so it is really depressing that games are only just starting to use 6 cores.

A couple of games will push my 3930K and 5960X to 100%, but not constantly. (Like Civ.)
I am actually glad for that though, Australian summers are hot enough. :P

Locknuts said:

Kirin_gaming said:
The Sandy Bridge chips were, and still are great for gaming.I had a 2600k for my first build ever and managed to get it to 5.0Ghz for daily use, it was great for emulation, maybe even better than my 5960X running at 4.5Ghz.It is really sad that a lot of software doesn't take advantage of newer chips, I've never seen my CPU go above 55% while gaming at 4K and multitasking at the same time, just imagine the possibilities if all 16 threads were used effectively or even 32 threads in a not so distant future.

I've been hoping the Jaguar chips in the consoles would force devs to learn to code multithreaded software. It seems to be flowing over to the PC side, just really slowly. Probably because a good dual core can still easily outperform the 8 core CPUs in the consoles doing the same tasks.

Not to mention that the consoles sadly don't have all 8 cores available for gaming anyway.

Still, I am happy that Sony and Microsoft went for more cores, rather than 2 beefy ones, hopefully with game engines targeting 6 cores on the consoles the PC will benefit greatly in the future at an engine level.