I haven't got the faintest idea what CPU I need

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

Hi all, I've been planning to make my first pc build and I legitmently can't figure out my CPU needs. 

This was my preliminarily choices:

CPU: Intel Core i7-13700K 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor  
CPU Cooler: Deepcool AK620 ZERO DARK 68.99 CFM CPU Cooler 
Motherboard: Asus TUF GAMING B760M-PLUS WIFI II Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-5200 CL40 Memory 
Storage: Western Digital Black SN850X 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  
Video Card: MSI VENTUS 3X OC GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16 GB Video Card
Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: Corsair RM850e (2023) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

 

Everything except for the RTX 4070 Ti Super, a Mid Tower Case, and a Micro ATX Motherboard (actually the last two is up to change as well, it just felt small enough to fit in my room and large enough....just large enough).

 

Ok, to circle back, I don't really know how much will I need my CPU to perform. I'm open to both AMD and Intel.

- It's going to bt 99% internet surfing, I'm terminally online, watching videos, and staring at the screen. With a bad habit of keeping a lot of tabs, windows, and programs together. Discord, mail, photoshop, if anything I can run the the background without needing to occupy the window, it's likely going to be in the background.

- Moderate gaming. Like gosh, a handful of times a month? Mostly last generation of games, StarCraft, Halo MCC, pre-2010 COD and Battlefield, Hades, I do want to try newer titles like Halo Infinite. And I do plan to play those games as visually amazing as possible. But nothing crazy with like 4K on 144Hz. 

- Generate AI. Probably the real reason I'm picking a good GPU. Just playing around with them. Stable Diffusion, local LLMs, TTS. Both using and training. 

 

And Looking at it, it feels like I'm only doing the most bare bone basic computer stuff with sudden high demand for GPU-heavy tasks occasionally and doesn't want to be bottlenecked by my CPU during high demand.

So questions:

- Are most of my programs single-threaded applications? Do the core and threat count not matter that much?

- Is an iGPU worth it? I am planning to use 2 monitors and it felt like a nice backup in case something went wrong with the GPU. Would having an iGPU but not really "using it" impact performance?

- i5/Ryzen 5 or i7/Ryzen 7? I don't need an i9/Ryzen 9, right?

 

Sorry for the long tedious post, it's just really bothering me for how little I understand about it.

[MiszS]

for this price, the 7800X3D is way better, since it's the best gaming cpu, and uses way less power, but it's a bit worse than 13700K in AI training. Having an iGPU but not using it won't impact the perfomance at all, but can be usefull for troubleshooting

[Brian McKee]

Good thing about intel for a 99% web surfing computer is the fact that you can use the iGPU for all of that and be way better in terms of overall powerdraw. Intel's quicksync is truly amazing these days. Not to mention it can be used to stream record game footage to leave better headroom for the GPU, and in my opinion it looks better than AMD's and Nvidia's hardware encoding...

[Eigenvektor]

14 minutes ago, Brian McKee said:

Good thing about intel for a 99% web surfing computer is the fact that you can use the iGPU for all of that and be way better in terms of overall powerdraw.

Note that AMD's 7000 series has an iGPU in every CPU now, same as Intel. For Zen 3 and older only CPUs with a G in their name had iGPUs.

 

Not that it really matters, since the iGPU isn't used if you have a discrete GPU unless you plug the monitor specifically into the iGPU. And in normal desktop use the GPU should use relatively little power already.

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

1 hour ago, MiszS said:

for this price, the 7800X3D is way better, since it's the best gaming cpu, and uses way less power, but it's a bit worse than 13700K in AI training. Having an iGPU but not using it won't impact the perfomance at all, but can be usefull for troubleshooting

Yeah, that's why I switched from 7800X3D to i7.

So an i7 is probably warranted? What if I am using the iGPU as a second monitor or record screen like what @Brian McKee said?

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

30 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Note that AMD's 7000 series has an iGPU in every CPU now, same as Intel. For Zen 3 and older only CPUs with a G in their name had iGPUs.

 

Not that it really matters, since the iGPU isn't used if you have a discrete GPU unless you plug the monitor specifically into the iGPU. And in normal desktop use the GPU should use relatively little power already.

I might use it for a second monitor. But that's more of an excuse to get an iGPU with a GPU already. Or just not use it at all and only for backup and troubleshooting.

Not sure what's the benefit using the iGPU for a second display.

[Lurick]

If you're 99% web browsing and maybe some moderate gaming with dabbling in AI, which will be pretty much GPU focused. Does a marginal difference between the 7800X3D and 13700K really matter? Unless you're doing this full tilt and need every drop of performance why split hairs like that and not save the power and go with the AMD CPU?

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

17 minutes ago, Lurick said:

If you're 99% web browsing and maybe some moderate gaming with dabbling in AI, which will be pretty much GPU focused. Does a marginal difference between the 7800X3D and 13700K really matter? Unless you're doing this full tilt and need every drop of performance why split hairs like that and not save the power and go with the AMD CPU?

I'm also questioning if I even need an Ryzen 7 or i7. I picked it mostly just because I'm using an i5 and I thought I was CPU bottlenecked (it was just search index was broken and file explorer eats up everything in the background).

Also the iGPU difference, if it even matters and if intel offers a better one with better media encoder (or if THAT is useful, god it's like a cascading series of questions that just gets more complex)

[Eigenvektor]

54 minutes ago, TheIndecisiveMollusk said:

I might use it for a second monitor. But that's more of an excuse to get an iGPU with a GPU already. Or just not use it at all and only for backup and troubleshooting. Not sure what's the benefit using the iGPU for a second display.

Any modern GPU can power more than one monitor, typically up to four. So you don't need an iGPU for that. It's mostly a good fallback option, if your GPU ever stops working and you need something for troubleshooting or until you get a replacement.

 

There's no real benefit to using the iGPU for a second monitor. The GPU can render a simple desktop all day long while playing a game on the main monitor, no issue. I can play a game on my main monitor and watch YouTube on the other one and my RX 6600 is way less powerful than an RTX 4070 TiS

 

38 minutes ago, TheIndecisiveMollusk said:

I'm also questioning if I even need an Ryzen 7 or i7. I picked it mostly just because I'm using an i5 and I thought I was CPU bottlenecked (it was just search index was broken and file explorer eats up everything in the background).

Unless you're playing games at low resolution and as many FPS as you can (think competitive shooters), there's no real need for in i7 or R7 unless you do other tasks that are CPU intensive.

 

Whether you need the media encoder really depends on whether you encode videos or not. And since you're planning on a discrete GPU anyway that can do exactly the same thing, it realistically doesn't matter.

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

6 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Any modern GPU can power more than one monitor, typically up to four. So you don't need an iGPU for that. It's mostly a good fallback option, if your GPU ever stops working and you need something for troubleshooting or until you get a replacement.

 

There's no real benefit to using the iGPU for a second monitor. The GPU can render a simple desktop all day long while playing a game on the main monitor, no issue. I can play a game on my main monitor and watch YouTube on the other one and my RX 6600 is way less powerful than an RTX 4070 TiS

 

Unless you're playing games at low resolution and as many FPS as you can (think competitive shooters), there's no real need for in i7 or R7 unless you do other tasks that are CPU intensive.

 

Whether you need the media encoder really depends on whether you encode videos or not. And since you're planning on a discrete GPU anyway that can do exactly the same thing, it realistically doesn't matter.

Does anything I seem to do that is CPU intensive? Does an Ryzen 7 or i7 actually offer improvement for my needs or really there's no difference (like getting a 4K monitor but everything is done at 1080p).

[Eigenvektor]

3 hours ago, TheIndecisiveMollusk said:

Does anything I seem to do that is CPU intensive? Does an Ryzen 7 or i7 actually offer improvement for my needs or really there's no difference (like getting a 4K monitor but everything is done at 1080p).

None of the games you mention should be particularly CPU intensive. Since they are older titles they will generally be single threaded or very lightly threaded. Even newer titles don't tend to use much beyond 6–8 cores. Some do (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), but even there the benefit from anything beyond 8 cores is marginal at best.

 

For gaming the best CPU you can get is really the 7800X3D, as was mentioned above. Beats basically any Intel offering while using less power. The 7950X3D can make sense if you do both gaming and productivity tasks that scale to many cores. The 7900X3D is the worst of both worlds and generally not recommended.

 

But you realistically won't notice a difference unless you play games on super low resolution with minimal details to run at 300+ fps. The more graphical bells and whistles you enable and the lower the frame rate gets (i.e. the more work the GPU has to do), the less demanding games tend get on the CPU side (since it doesn't need to provide new data to the GPU as often).

 

Not sure about training LLMs etc, but my understanding is that it will mostly tax the GPU, not the CPU.

[TheIndecisiveMollusk]

29 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

None of the games you mention should be particularly CPU intensive. Since they are older titles they will generally be single threaded or very lightly threaded. Even newer titles don't tend to use much beyond 6–8 cores. Some do (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), but even there the benefit from anything beyond 8 cores is marginal at best.

 

For gaming the best CPU you can get is really the 7800X3D, as was mentioned above. Beats basically any Intel offering while using less power. The 7950X3D can make sense if you do both gaming and productivity tasks that scale to many cores. The 7900X3D is the worst of both worlds and generally not recommended.

 

But you realistically won't notice a difference unless you play games on super low resolution with minimal details to run at 300+ fps. The more graphical bells and whistles you enable and the lower the frame rate gets (i.e. the more work the GPU has to do), the less demanding games tend get on the CPU side (since it doesn't need to provide new data to the GPU as often).

 

Not sure about training LLMs etc, but my understanding is that it will mostly tax the GPU, not the CPU.

Thank you for the detailed response.

 

Yeah, if it were gaming focused I would go 7800X3D, but since it wasn't I chose a i7.  I can't say if the things I do count as "productivity", as they shouldn't be taxing on performance.