How do you tell a CPU's single core perfomance?

[Sir Dude]

I'm trying to become more familiar with PC hardware so I can make more informed purchases in the future. I play a lot of Minecraft and over the past year have dabbled in making servers. My latest attempt was a modded server running over 100 mods and as it turns out, my little Athlon II couldn't keep up with the workload. In doing research I learned that Minecraft is a single threaded game and can only utilize a fraction of a CPU's power. I learned this the hard way when I borrowed a friend's computer which had some Xeon chip inside it with really good multi-core performance, only to have the server's max stable player count go from 3 players at a time to 5.

 

The thing that gets me and the reason why I'm asking this is product pages don't seem to give me the info I need. I remember hearing in an LTT video (and double checking on Newegg to be sure) that a high end 64 core server CPU which absolutely crushed games only has 2.0Ghz speed, whereas my almost 10 year old Windows 7 PC had 2.3Ghz (albeit like, only 2 cores or something). I know core count can tell you roughly how fast it is, but how do you tell how fast each core is? I know clock speed doesn't mean much nowadays and while doing research on this I learned about IPC, or Instructions Per Cycle, but I don't know how useful that metric is and it's not listed on product pages anyway.

 

Do you just have to do research on each CPU you're interested in or is there a faster off-hand way of finding out?

[Dedayog]

This..

 

"Do you just have to do research on each CPU you're interested in or is there a faster off-hand way of finding out?"

 

And a lot of YT videos, Passmark, etc. etc etc.

[Sir Dude]

18 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

This..

 

"Do you just have to do research on each CPU you're interested in or is there a faster off-hand way of finding out?"

 

And a lot of YT videos, Passmark, etc. etc etc.

Damn, I was hoping it'd be easier. I think I did briefly see that Passmark had a single core chart, is that true and is it good/reliable?

[Dedayog]

33 minutes ago, Sir Dude said:

Damn, I was hoping it'd be easier. I think I did briefly see that Passmark had a single core chart, is that true and is it good/reliable?

Yep, and they break down decent comparison graphs as well.  Always been a good source for relative performance but as with everything apply your use case, logic and common sense.