so we reviewed the core i7 5960x here an
eight core hyper-threaded ddr4 fueled
monster of a computer processor that seems to be positioned as the elite tier
CPU in gaming systems among boutique system builders and yet
doesn't appear at first glance at least to offer a compelling improvement over a
more mainstream and much less expensive
ddr3 equipped quad core processor like
the core i7 4790k perhaps there is more to this than meets
the eye though like how i've been using an iphone 6 for a couple weeks i mean
actually that one's pretty easy i have a review coming subscribe so you don't miss it anyway back to CPU performance
for now though
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click now to learn more so here's the problem with the way that benchmarks are
typically run in a CPU review in order to isolate as many variables as possible
and keep the results as reproducible as possible this is the correct way to do
things scientifically speaking by the way background processes on the system are
kept in check so only the applications being benchmarked at a given time are
run and fresh system images are loaded very regularly to ensure random extra
junk isn't interfering with getting the best results possible however in the
real world a more cluttered environment the kind where you've got you know a
thousand sometimes poorly coded random apps in the system tray like bloated
gaming peripheral software anti-virus game streaming voip clients printer auto
updaters etc is oftentimes more realistic
and beyond that power users and prosumers may be interested to know how
their system will perform in games when they intentionally have a demanding
application running in the background so the test i set up is based on a worst
case scenario for a prosumer like a game
streamer someone who's heavily into gaming and uses their gaming rig for
some content creation as well so here's my hypothetical scenario our pro
streamer just finished editing together a highlight reel in sony vegas pro 12
and is rendering the file then he or she wants to fire up a game we'll use far
cry 3 at 1080p ultra details with 8x msaa wants to stream aforementioned game
on twitch using the fast preset with an hd webcam feed in the corner using
xsplit wants to use screen capture to have a buddy skype in to join the stream
and then while all that's happening an antivirus scan starts running in the
background so for the test i used an ASUS rampage 5
extreme motherboard with a core i7 5960x then i used the handy dandy
multiplier adjustments that all k and x series chips have along with ASUS's
manual turbo boost controls and hyper threading toggle to simulate the
performance of all the other cpus in the
test so i'm using this the same platform same os
everything so there are two different ways to
evaluate the performance of our system here first up we can look strictly at
average FPS in our game over a two minute span at the beginning of my
benchmark the overclocked eight core runs away with this but not everyone
overclocks and at stock speed our quad core 4790k with hyper threading does
just as well as our stock
5960x which costs about three times as much presumably thanks to its high turbo
clock speed of 4.2 to 4.4 gigahertz
adding minimum frame rates to the mix gives us a little bit more insight
though now we can see that our six core
seems to be struggling a bit thanks to its lower core count or lower clock
speed compared to the other competitors depending on which one we're looking at
it against and even though on average our quad cores hold up against our eight
core the dips in frame rate are 20 lower
which would normally be okay but what the numbers don't even tell us here is
how noticeable the hitching and stuttering is in each of those configs
the a-core configs on the other hand both ran the game with smoother
animations and the six core stuttered occasionally but better than the quad
cores the quad core with hyper threading was noticeable but usable and the quad
core without hyper threading was basically unplayable and you can see a
full explanation for why these FPS numbers might look okay even though the
animations are terrible in the video linked here
but there's another completely different angle that we can use to examine this
torture test scenario to give us a clearer idea of how the chips are
holding up to the load how well was the stuff in the background running well
first let's have a look at dropped frames in the twitch stream only our
non-hyper-threaded quad-core dropped frames here so we can see that our
simulated 4690k was really struggling to multitask like
this in a way that the others weren't
now finally we can look at render times
it's a one minute chunk of my Corsair gaming k70 RGB keyboard video that i
exported at 1080p with CPU encoding while everything else was running and
this is where we see the men separated from the boys our hyper threaded six
core stutters less in-game and renders
the video a full two minutes faster than the hyper-threaded quad core even though
its average frame rates are not as good then our a-core improves frame rates
smooths out gameplay completely and knocks another 40 seconds off the render
time with our overclocked 4.4 gigahertz 8 core delivering smooth gameplay the
best frame rates out of all the configs and also it manages to render the video
in a third the time of our similarly clocked quad core with hyper threading
so in conclusion am i saying any of this is
the kind of thing a normal user will encounter every day or am i saying that
this is the only way to achieve butter smooth gaming while working on projects
in the background absolutely not
using a device with an onboard h.264 encoder setting up a separate machine
for capture or utilizing a network render farm are all strategies that
might actually be more elegant depending on the exact workload now the point of
this video was just to explore the effects of an overwhelming workload on a
variety of different configs and have a look at what those lucky dogs with eight
core extreme editions can throw at their machines before they even really start
to feel it and the answer i guess is a whole heck of a lot
guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you
disliked it leave a comment letting me know was this about what you were
expecting did you think it would be able to handle much more did you think even
the a core would suffer love to hear from you guys also check
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