R 5 3500X vs i5 10400F

[Sinister6]

Hello everybody,

Been trying to help a friend of mine to build a gaming PC, he's gonna use it mostly for 1080P gaming @ 60 Hz for now, maybe in the future he's gonna buy a better monitor.
Now, I am trying to decide which of those CPUs it's better. From what I saw on the internet in gaming benchmarks, there's not a big difference between them ( 4-5 fps ) and I'm willing to go with the 10400F because it has 6 more threads.

 

What do you think?

 

Thank you,

[Nena Trinity]

Depends on the price, personally in most countries the 10400F seems like the better value at the moment but the other has a upgrade path.

[Sinister6]

The price difference between those two is really small, less than 10$.

[Nena Trinity]

Just now, Sinister6 said:

The price difference between those two is really small, less than 10$.

3500X is the inferior chip so unless you plan to upgrade the CPU later in the near future I would take the 10400F also boards may differ the cost to perfomance ratio further.

[jaslion]

10400f. 6 more threads is a huge bonus. That and 6 core cpu's without extra threads struggle in multiple games with stuttering

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

10400f. 6 more threads is a huge bonus. That and 6 core cpu's without extra threads struggle in multiple games with stuttering

I was under impression a true 6c/6t would be about the same as a 4c/8t...

[Tika]

Add only $50 to the 3500X and you have a 3600 which outperforms the 10400f and has a much better upgrade path. Just saying.

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, Nena Trinity said:

I was under impression a true 6c/6t would be about the same as a 4c/8t...

Not quite. As well simply put if a game wants 8 threads but instead get 6 really strong ones it's still gonna try to load those 2 extra threads somewhere and have to relocate that which can easily be messed up by task scheduling and result in stutters. It's why some weaker 4c/8t cpu's (to a certain extent of course those 1.8ghz xeons obviously don't count) have far more stable gameplay even tho the max fps is lower

[porina]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

Not quite. As well simply put if a game wants 8 threads but instead get 6 really strong ones it's still gonna try to load those 2 extra threads somewhere and have to relocate that which can easily be messed up by task scheduling and result in stutters. It's why some weaker 4c/8t cpu's (to a certain extent of course those 1.8ghz xeons obviously don't count) have far more stable gameplay even tho the max fps is lower

If all else were equal I'd pick 6c6t over 4c8t any time. Both Intel HT and AMD SMT give practical boosts at best around 50%, so in that scenario 4x8t would equal 6c6t in computational throughput. In practice, very little software scales that well. Cinebench up to R20 is around 30% boost. I haven't tested R23 yet, but don't expect it to be much different.

 

When game software fires out stuff to CPU, it just needs to get it done ASAP. 6 thread, 8 threads, doesn't matter. 6c6t is more predictable in that sense, since you never get delays between two threads on the same core. Chances are you have more effective resource also, so it'll get done faster. I've actually done this in practice. When I was gaming on 6700k I was hitting CPU limits fairly regularly. I got a 8086k, much faster. For other reasons I turned off HT at one point and was running it 6c6t. Still better at gaming than the 6700k.