Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Pemalite said:

Jizz_Beard_thePirate said:

Personally it depends on whether or not you actively are using those additional cores or if they are just sitting there waiting to be used for many years later. Cause for a gaming build, a person could get a much better experience investing more into gpu than a cpu with more cores. For example, if a person is thinking between spending extra $200 to go from 8 to 12 cores or 9060 XT to 9070, they would get much more usage out of getting a 9070 vs those extra cores. It would also be easier to sell to a wider audience cause gamers generally value a higher tier gpu over a higher tier cpu.

On top of that, when it's time to upgrade, you may be getting the higher core count cpu for a mainstream price anyway. Like a 9700 with 8 cores costs about the same as an i7 7700k with 4 cores used to back in the day. And thanks to Amds platform longevity, you might not need to upgrade the ram or motherboard.

But if you are actively using those extra cores, then yea,by all means buy the higher core setup. My 5950x was such a wonderful cpu with 16 cores. It was awesome for vms and shader compliation. But after my new job which is more cloud based, I didn't need 16 cores for my next upgrade so instead, I decided to save $600 cad and put it towards a 4090 instead of a 4080. And as zen 6 is coming with 12 cores per ccd, we might soon get 12 core mainstream cpus.

They aren't just "sitting there waiting to be used many years later". - You tend to have less of a performance penalty if you have a multitude of apps open.
Think: Virus scanner, xsplit, discord, web browser, Steam, GOG, Epic Store and more can all take resources.

Some games already will use every CPU thread you can give it... Think: Civilization, Cities Skylines 2, Ashes of the Singularity and more.
Even Cyberpunk sees scaling from 12 cores/24 threads to 16 cores/32 threads.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-cpu-scaling-benchmarks


And whilst you are correct that we may see 12 cores as the "mainstream part" - It's going to be unaffordable for most as the price of DDR5 Ram and NAND is making any future platform changes unobtainable for most anyway... At-least for the next few years.
Those who are still on AM4 with a 12 or 16 core processor still have many many years of life left in the tank. - Especially as the X3D parts have sky rocketed in price on AM4, making the choice for a 16/12 core part a better option for most which are still cheap.

And as gamers we tend to upgrade GPU's more often than CPU's anyway, so being a little more conservative on the GPU, with the intent to upgrade it in 2-3 years time isn't the worst decision in the world. (An upgrade you would do anyway.)
The 9060XT isn't exactly a part that is unplayable in modern games verses the 9070.

I have always gone for the highest core counts and have always gotten stupidly long system life out of my systems.

Those things take so little resources with modern hardware that it's not even worth looking into the difference. I haven't seen my 7800X3D anywhere close to 100% cpu usage during games even when paired with a 4090 even though I do run two 4k monitors that have plenty of apps, browser tabs and etc open at all times. I am sure there is a difference but it's so negligible unless you are running cpu heavy games such as the ones that you stated. But if those are your main games to play, then yea, get all the cpu cores you need similar to if you run cpu heavy applications.

But generally for many gaming related applications, the ones that take a lot of resources such a streaming will yield better results if you offload them to the gpu anyway which is one of the reasons why so many streamers use Nvidia specifically due to how good it's H264 encoders are. And the thing with a game like cyberpunk is you will be heavily gpu bound well before you will see benefits of cpu scaling come into factor. Both of those will certainly be more beneficial if you invest into a stronger gpu over cpu.

The funny thing about what's affordable and what's not is that GPUs ever since the RTX 3000/RX 6000 have been the one key thing that always seen awful prices whether it by crypto, Ai or other nonsense. CPUs have been pretty dang cheap and still are with constant sales. Ram and SSDs for the past however many years have been super cheap and only really have gotten expensive now. And for Ram prices funly enough will also be affecting GPU prices due to gpus having vram. If anything, the smartest thing to do these days would be to get a gpu with as much vram and features as possible and hold for as long as possible since with CPUs, it's competitive landscape should continue to be cheap for the foreseeable future. And when it comes time to sell that gpu, you will get a more of a return because of how gpu prices seem to get cucked every generation due to some nonsense.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 20 December 2025