it's a fact of life that wherever you go someone is always trying to sell you
something whether it's a brand hyping up their latest 1.21 gigahertz CPU or a
so-called influencer rubbing your face in a brand new gaming setup that you
would have to save for years to afford for the third time this week
but i'ma let you in on a little secret come on come over here
you don't have to buy anything in fact i
bet the old crappy quad-core pc that you already
have is good enough for anything you'd need it to do and if it's not you could
get one of those for much cheaper than the fancy 8 or 16 core cpus that all the
big players want you to buy let me show you
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and yes i appreciate the irony
there have been many popular 4-core cpus over the
there have been many popular 4-core cpus over the last 10 years and we can't test
all of them but we do have a handful dating from today all the way back to
early 2013. we've used an rtx 2080
founders edition for all of our tests and we ran our gaming tests at 1080p so
more of the burden will be on the CPU rather than the GPU i don't want to
waste your time so let's jump right into the results where
wow look at that i mean it sure is easy
to show you what a piece of crap your old 4770k is in it the 3300x which
represents a modern quad-core CPU manages to beat it handily and stepping
up to six or eight cores especially with the 5800x which features AMD's latest
zen 3 architecture is going to deliver a completely different computing
experience that is as long as you actually use any of these
applications the truth of the matter is that the benchmarks that we and other
members of the tech press use to compare processors are not chosen for how
representative they are of the typical user's daily workload rather they're
often chosen because they allow us to demonstrate how their performance
differs for heavy users or in future
workloads that might not be mainstream yet but we expect them to be at some
point down the road like there's a pretty good chance that you personally
have never fired up v-ray or cinema 4d
there's a good chance you don't edit or encode videos so if we flashed these
charts in front of you you could easily end up spending a lot of money for
something that you might never need even file decompression which is
something that we all do often when we unpack a download from the internet and
is a poster child for the benefits of multi-core cpus
well it's a relatively light workload these days and most decompression tasks
will complete in seconds on any of the cpus on this chart so
does it really matter the two or three
times a week that it comes up if it's 25 seconds or 45 seconds it's time for the
other side of this coin while our cinebench r23 single thread web browsing
grand theft auto 5 and cs go results demonstrate that there are certainly
benefits to modern processors the addition of more cores
isn't the biggest one and check this out if we covered the
legend on these assassins creed valhalla results you'd be hard-pressed to guess
which cpus have four six or eight cores
go ahead and try but hold on a second Linus everyone knows that FPS and action
games are still dependent on just a handful of threads you need to test
strategy games that can use a multi-core CPU to calculate all the possible ai
moves or whatever and yeah someday that
will probably be a valid point but it is not this day
and we did a quick civilization 6 run on our zen 2 cpus to demonstrate that point
now with the latest gen consoles from the big players featuring eight core 16
thread cpus now we are going to see developers really push to take advantage
of everything they can squeeze out of them but if history has anything to go on
it'll be a while before we see a game that was really built from the ground up
for this generation of hardware and it'll be years before we see these many
core designs used to their fullest potential which doesn't mean our video
is over not even close i haven't even mentioned lttstore.com
with its great designs and high quality shirts yet the thing is game consoles do
pretty much one thing they game but your
pc could be doing any number of things capturing video from your webcam
removing ambient noise from your microphone feed encoding a stream to share with your friends or viewers what
happens to our quad-core performance when we throw common background tasks
into the mix so let's fire up premiere we're not working on it right now it's
just sitting there uh we're gonna need discord a little bit of obs
stream that gameplay right and love me some background youtube music playlist
action all right let's do this again despite the fact
that we had all of this extra software open in the background none of our cpus
performed in a way that i would describe as being unplayable our older four core
chips did struggle significantly more in cs go with all these programs running
with the 4770k actually losing nearly half of its performance but that still
left it at over 120 frames per second and that would be more than good enough
for most people unless they're especially competitive in which case
guys turn off your background tasks all right and moving to our more modern quad
core 3300 x it lost only a marginally
higher percentage of its performance when compared to the eight core 5800x
in gta 5 the performance hit was even more negligible what this tells us then
is that sure if you have more overhead
overall there will be less to worry about when you open extra apps if you
have a mini core CPU but as long as you're not going to be running 30 pieces
of software while you're running your game and expecting to get the maximum
FPS you're still going to get a completely playable experience
but there are other advantages to overbuilding a gaming rig particularly
with modern AMD processors if you allocate four of your course
exclusively to your game and this is something you can do manually or there
are tools to help you do it theoretically it could help smooth out
the experience both by removing extra
clutter from background tasks on those cores
and by having all of the game tasks running on the same physical group of
course for faster cache access at least in theory in practice we didn't observe
nearly as much difference as we expected but some users on reddit have reported
measurable performance improvements particularly in cs go with first gen
ryzen chips so your mileage may vary the
truth is though that if you don't have a fortune to spend on a gaming pc
that's okay a chip from 2013 may come with unpatched
security flaws that have scary names like spectre and meltdown and microsoft
warns that older platforms experience 52 more kernel mode crashes in Windows
11. but real talk spectre and meltdown are only of concern to enterprise and
business customers for the most part and 52 more than point two percent is point
three percent that sounds like a risk worth taking when a 4770k can be had for
about a hundred bucks on ebay there is still the question of whether it's wise
to buy into aging technology like ddr3
when older ryzen 3000 chips can be had for not much more but that one is just
gonna come down to your individual budget which we have no way of knowing
what we do know is that four cores is still enough unless you actually need
extra multi-core grunt for content creation or for non-gaming workloads
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oh and you'll also get 25 in credit towards your account if you guys enjoyed
this video maybe check out our ryzen 5000 review which has a bit more detail
about how tasks pinned to certain CPU
cores can have a performance benefit