Performance evaluation for i5 7400

[Fasauceome]

Booted up my brother's PC with the intention to see what kind of improvements I could make. His parts are these.

Since he's got single channel ram, I wanted to see what I could do with dual channel, so I borrowed some corsair dominators from a friend and tossed them in. At 2400MHz, the CPU was actually able to push a bit harder, in Overwatch I was significantly less limited and so whatever particle effects and logistics were straining the system before are a little easier. I didn't suffer from the stutters it used to have.

However, For Honor, with its AI logistics and robust level environments, still gave this old quad core a hard time. Jittering stutters and drops below 30 FPS abound. My "benchmark" was twofold: can I run this previously struggling game well, and can I watch youtube or some other simple background task while doing it? While running the games alone showed good improvement, the simple presence of an active webpage is tough for a last gen i5. (Steam downloads also introduced some issues, but they may be unrelated).

 

Quad cores really do seem to be on their way out, but i'd love to have the chance to do more test like this. If anyone has similar experiences, let me know. I often use my brother's PC as an example of a good case by case bottleneck scenario, and more info to back that up would be nice.

[food158]

4 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

Booted up my brother's PC with the intention to see what kind of improvements I could make. His parts are these.

Since he's got single channel ram, I wanted to see what I could do with dual channel, so I borrowed some corsair dominators from a friend and tossed them in. At 2400MHz, the CPU was actually able to push a bit harder, in Overwatch I was significantly less limited and so whatever particle effects and logistics were straining the system before are a little easier. I didn't suffer from the stutters it used to have.

However, For Honor, with its AI logistics and robust level environments, still gave this old quad core a hard time. Jittering stutters and drops below 30 FPS abound. My "benchmark" was twofold: can I run this previously struggling game well, and can I watch youtube or some other simple background task while doing it. While running the games alone showed good improvement, the simple presence of an active webpage is tough for a last gen i5. (Steam downloads also introduced some issues, but they may be unrelated).

 

Quad cores erally do seem to be on their way out, but i'd love to have the chance to do more test like this. If anyone has similar experiences, let me know. I often use my brother's PC as an example of a good case by case bottleneck scenario, and more info to back that up would be nice.

Wow.. that CPU isn't even that old.

[Crunchy Dragon]

9 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

Quad cores erally do seem to be on their way out, but i'd love to have the chance to do more test like this. If anyone has similar experiences, let me know. I often use my brother's PC as an example of a good case by case bottleneck scenario, and more info to back that up would be nice.

I would argue that the i5-7400 also isn't that good of a CPU, which may or may not effect the outcome.

 

Something better such as a 7700K would yield better results, I'm sure.

[paddy-stone]

If anything, I'd say the thing holding it back more than others, is the clock speed of the locked CPU in this case maybe. Although I agree with you about the lack of more cores being a hindrance too, I think with a higher clocked quad core you'd see less issues maybe. Plus if you had hyperthreading/SMT would go a long way to improving it too.

[Fasauceome]

41 minutes ago, food158 said:

Wow.. that CPU isn't even that old.

I know right? Intel bumming around and failing to innovate didn't help the ol' quad core.

 

36 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I would argue that the i5-7400 also isn't that good of a CPU, which may or may not effect the outcome.

 

Something better such as a 7700K would yield better results, I'm sure.

 

7 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

If anything, I'd say the thing holding it back more than others, is the clock speed of the locked CPU in this case maybe. Although I agree with you about the lack of more cores being a hindrance too, I think with a higher clocked quad core you'd see less issues maybe. Plus if you had hyperthreading/SMT would go a long way to improving it too.

Yes, the all core turbo is a meager 3.2GHz and I tried to improve this with turbo enhancements in the BIOS to no avail. Background tasks like the aforementioned steam downloads and YouTube playback would love HT as well. I've considered an i7 7700 or 6700 off eBay or something, which would yield quite a boost, but my brother plans on selling this PC so there's no point. w/ keyboard, mouse, microphone, and monitor, it'll fetch around $600 or so and I plan on getting a Ryzen 3000 CPU and see what Navi brings for a home sleeper for general use to replace it.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, fasauceome said:

Yes, the all core turbo is a meager 3.2GHz and I tried to improve this with turbo enhancements in the BIOS to no avail. Background tasks like the aforementioned steam downloads and YouTube playback would love HT as well. I've considered an i7 7700 or 6700 off eBay or something, which would yield quite a boost, but my brother plans on selling this PC so there's no point. w/ keyboard, mouse, microphone, and monitor, it'll fetch around $600 or so and I plan on getting a Ryzen 3000 CPU and see what Navi brings for a home sleeper for general use to replace it.

I'm hoping to make a jump for Ryzen 3xxx this year as well, gonna repurpose my current rig as a streaming box/gaming PC for when friends come over.

 

Intel's lack of innovation goes way beyond the 7400, a 2600K isn't that much worse than an 8700K.

[paddy-stone]

11 hours ago, fasauceome said:

Yes, the all core turbo is a meager 3.2GHz and I tried to improve this with turbo enhancements in the BIOS to no avail. Background tasks like the aforementioned steam downloads and YouTube playback would love HT as well. I've considered an i7 7700 or 6700 off eBay or something, which would yield quite a boost, but my brother plans on selling this PC so there's no point. w/ keyboard, mouse, microphone, and monitor, it'll fetch around $600 or so and I plan on getting a Ryzen 3000 CPU and see what Navi brings for a home sleeper for general use to replace it.

Yeah, that's a good call I think. For that money he should be able to get a 6 or 8 core, b550, ram, and possibly GPU depending on what navi brings... but even if navi is too much, there's always a 1660ti,rx590 etc around.

[Fasauceome]

3 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Yeah, that's a good call I think. For that money he should be able to get a 6 or 8 core, b550, ram, and possibly GPU depending on what navi brings... but even if navi is too much, there's always a 1660ti,rx590 etc around.

I plan on stepping down instead of up from the 970, if not just matching it. Low end 1080p card is what I'm after, and if the rumored iGPU skus are decent at it, I'm all about it.

 

That being said, I would have loved to keep this system as a test bench for more data, since quad cores and even dual cores are still favored by some people. I've seen recommendations for the G4560 and 200GE (even though the latter just superior as it offers an actual upgrade path) so seeing the evolution of gaming performance on these CPUs is pretty useful.

[paddy-stone]

8 hours ago, fasauceome said:

I plan on stepping down instead of up from the 970, if not just matching it. Low end 1080p card is what I'm after, and if the rumored iGPU skus are decent at it, I'm all about it.

 

That being said, I would have loved to keep this system as a test bench for more data, since quad cores and even dual cores are still favored by some people. I've seen recommendations for the G4560 and 200GE (even though the latter just superior as it offers an actual upgrade path) so seeing the evolution of gaming performance on these CPUs is pretty useful.

Yeah, me too, waiting to see if the low end APUs are gonna be even better than the 200GE.. have been considering that for my rebuild server for a while, but keep putting it off as I want to see what 3rd gen brings. I may just get one anyway, and if I want to upgrade just sell it again.