Question about CPU's

[Robin_Code]

• How do I determine what the perfect CPU for me is? 
• Does higher clock + cores always mean a better CPU? (considering 2700x has a better base clock than the 3700x)
• For World of Warcraft, should I buy Intel or AMD?

[Eigenvektor]

2 minutes ago, Robin_Code said:

• How do I determine what the perfect CPU for me is? 
• Does higher clock + cores always mean a better CPU? (considering 2700x has a better base clock than the 3700x)
• For World of Warcraft, should I buy Intel or AMD?

The perfect CPU depends on your use case. Games mostly profit from a faster GPU. The CPU needs to be fast enough to keep the GPU fed with data. Of course some games do need a fast CPU, so you would have to see what kind of CPU is recommended.

 

Within the same generation, higher clocks and more cores should translate into faster performance. But a newer CPU can be faster than an older CPU at the same clock speed (You may have heard of IPC = Instructions per Clock). Base clock doesn't really matter here, the question is which has the faster boost clock and which can sustain that clock for longer. If the clock is the same, the CPU with higher IPC should win.

 

Both Intel or AMD should work for WoW, it's mainly a question of which CPU gives you more bang for the buck.

[Mister Woof]

4 hours ago, Robin_Code said:

• How do I determine what the perfect CPU for me is? 
• Does higher clock + cores always mean a better CPU? (considering 2700x has a better base clock than the 3700x)
• For World of Warcraft, should I buy Intel or AMD?

 

1. Your budget, your use case, your location market value for CPUs.

 

2. How fast a cpu is is determined by it's architecture, frequency, and configuration. Base clock generally is meaningless unless you are on a laptop. Modern CPUs never run at base clock, except for some i3s and lower. The 3700x is significantly faster.

 

3. WoW historically has been very limited in it's multithreaded optimization, and in the past only leveraged 4 fast and powerful cores and would not benefit from wider resources. at that time, 8 core first and second generation ryzens would perform much worse than even 4th generation i5s. In 8.1, they added dx12 support and increased it's multithreaded support. This helped a lot, but it isn't perfect. WoW still prefers fast and powerful cores over more slower weaker ones, but not nearly as bad. 

 

Usually, fps lows are whee you will see the cpu being your limiting factor, and this is usually in heavily populated areas and raids.

 

The average "benchmark" I see of WoW on YouTube is useless because usually it's a flight from dalaran with no people.

 

WoW is generally a very cpu intensive game. Usually, I'd say that there's little difference between the 2700x and 3700x for gaming because of gpu limitations, and that's true in most games.

 

Wow isn't one of them. It's one of the few cases where a more powerful cpu makes sense over a more perform gpu.

 

A weaker cpu might mean 40-50fps minimums in raids whereas a stronger one might result in 75-80 minimums.

 

I observed these values myself between my 8700k and 1600. Granted, there is a 40% difference in single threaded performance between the two.

 

Gpu utilization on either setup during those lows was below 70%, definitely signifying cpu bottlenecks.