Can't chose a CPU

[Dark Jesus]

Here my Problem, I don't know what brand nor what power I will need for my first build. I will use that pc for gaming (fallout 4, dota, DARK SOULS...) and to do some 1080p video editing. I think I will go with a i5 6500 and I dont know if its a good choice, is it over kill or not powerfull enought?

[RuLeZ]

Better to give the budget, what do you want to do with it and where do you live, GPU is way more important for most games.

[Imakuni]

7 minutes ago, Dark Jesus said:

Here my Problem, I don't know what brand nor what power I will need for my first build. I will use that pc for gaming (fallout 4, dota, DARK SOULS...) and to do some 1080p video editing. I think I will go with a i5 6500 and I dont know if its a good choice, is it over kill or not powerfull enought?

It's a middle of the ground CPU. Not really overkill, but not lacking either. If you are thinking of pairing it with something along the lines of an RX 480 or perhaps the 1060 if it turns out nicely, then it's a good choice.

[xentropa]

Should be fine

[AdmnPower]

I'd call it a solid buy, I know you're building your own computer but by comparison in the third tier of the preconfigured Alienware Alpha series only uses the i5-6400T which I believe is a lower wattage version of the i5. 

[Imakuni]

4 minutes ago, AdmnPower said:

I'd call it a solid buy, I know you're building your own computer but by comparison in the third tier of the preconfigured Alienware Alpha series only uses the i5-6400T which I believe is a lower wattage version of the i5. 

Not only lower wattage, much lower performance as well. The 6500 turbos to 3.3ghz, the 6400T only goes to 2.5 (as far as intense loads go).

 

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/processors/000005647.html

[Zyndo]

I5 6500 is right where you need to be for gaming today. 4 real cores, running at 3.6GHz on skylake architecture will be enough for any game on the market today. It will run all your games, and run them fairly well. Beyond MAYBE getting a 6600k and overclocking it to over 4GHz, there isn't really a better CPU o the market today for gaming. Certainly not for its price anyway. If you could spend a few extra bucks, it would be worth getting the  6600 (non k) or even the 6600k just for the extra headroom those chips could give, but there is certainly nothing lackluster about the i5 6500. It will suit all your gaming needs quite well.

[AdmnPower]

I also think you'll get more value if you spend the money that you save by doing the i5 over the i7 on your video card. It'll be a much more noticeable difference IMO. Might be the difference between being about to afford a 1070 instead of a 1060. 

[Dark Jesus]

I live in canada my bugets for the pc is 1200 CAD

[Imakuni]

3 minutes ago, Zyndo said:

I5 6500 is right where you need to be for gaming today. 4 real cores, running at 3.6GHz on skylake architecture will be enough for any game on the market today.

*3.3 for demanding games. 3.6 is only for potato single thread ones (though emulation comes to mind).

[Zyndo]

its stock clock is 3.2, its boost clock is 3.6. If it runs into a scenario where it needs more horsepower, its cores will run at 3.6GHz (assuming it has the cooling headroom to do so)

[Dark Jesus]

what kind of cooling sould I take in for budget of 50$ ?

[Mira Yurizaki]

Most games aren't CPU sensitive and are designed to run "at best" maybe at one or two tiers higher than their minimum requirements once you pair them up with a powerful GPU. If you need some proof of this, check out Anandtech's benchmark chart on the i5-6600 vs. the i3-6100TE. Most of the scores are within spitting distance of each other with a handful that have an appreciable difference in them.

 

Unless your time is literally money, the i5-6500 should be fine for 1080p video editing too. I mean hell, people are satisfied running 1080p video editing on a MacBook Pro.

 

4 minutes ago, Dark Jesus said:

what kind of cooling sould I take in for budget of 50$ ?

 

Depending on the case, most people will say a Cooler Master Hyper 212

[Zyndo]

2 minutes ago, Dark Jesus said:

what kind of cooling sould I take in for budget of 50$ ?

you wouldn't even have to spend that much. a hyper 212 evo is like 20 bucks and would be more than enough. there is also the slightly better Cryorig H7 which is usually in the 30-40 dollar area. You could also run stock cooler that comes with he chip if you want to save 50 bucks it should be enough (although not ideal) for your non-overclockable chip.

 

You could do something like take your 50 dollar cooler budget, spend 20 bucks on a hyper 212 evo, and take the other 30 dollars and upgrade your 6500 to a 6600. or pocket the money or whatever. just an idea =)

[Zyndo]

5 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Most games aren't CPU sensitive and are designed to run "at best" maybe at one or two tiers higher than their minimum requirements once you pair them up with a powerful GPU. If you need some proof of this, check out Anandtech's benchmark chart on the i5-6600 vs. the i3-6100TE. Most of the scores are within spitting distance of each other with one or two that have an appreciable difference in them.

Your benchmark results are at almost all low settings. at those settings you can't take advantage of any headroom the 6600 could give you. not to mention a 6600 could fuel a better GPU than a 6100 (but that would only really be relevant with really powerful GPU's)

[Dark Jesus]

well, like I said am canadian so a hyper 212 is like 40$

[ClobberXD]

Video-editing... Get a CPU one notch above the i5-6500, the i5-6600K. If that doesn't matter, the i5-6500 is just perfect for you!

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Zyndo said:

Your benchmark results are at almost all low settings. at those settings you can't take advantage of any headroom the 6600 could give you. not to mention a 6600 could fuel a better GPU than a 6100 (but that would only really be relevant with really powerful GPU's)

There's a mix of low and high. You're also supposed to test a CPU's ability in games by setting the graphics as low as possible take the GPU out of the equation.

[Zyndo]

6 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

There's a mix of low and high. You're also supposed to test a CPU's ability in games by setting the graphics as low as possible take the GPU out of the equation.

there are SOME settings that can also stress a CPU when increased.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Zyndo said:

there are SOME settings that can also stress a CPU when increased.

Like what? Remember I said graphics settings.

[Zyndo]

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Like what? Remember I said graphics settings.

Shadow/lighting effects can often be CPU bound. SOME kinds of AA can be CPU bound (although those are mostly on their way out), render distance is another one. I'm not privy to all the nuances of programming and hardware, but there are certainly settings that benefit from better CPU power. not to mention alot of newer games are becoming more optimized for 4 physical cores (rather than 4 logical cores) so in some games that alone can be a severe hinderance. I saw a video where a guy used an i3 on Rise of the Tomb Raider and turned the graphics WAYYY down but still was unable to get smooth framerates. he then upped to an I5 and turned graphics up and was still able to get a good smooth experience. (I forget which exact gpu he was using, but it was decent enough)

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Zyndo said:

Shadow/lighting effects can often be CPU bound. SOME kinds of AA can be CPU bound (although those are mostly on their way out), render distance is another one. I'm not privy to all the nuances of programming and hardware, but there are certainly settings that benefit from better CPU power. not to mention alot of newer games are becoming more optimized for 4 physical cores (rather than 4 logical cores) so in some games that alone can be a severe hinderance.

I did look into shadows and I'll bite that a lot of it is CPU dependent (https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/1l72o9/can_someone_explain_why_shadows_use_cpu_more_than/cbwd34z) but at the same time, people are suggesting in higher end settings it gets moved to the GPU. I'm not convinced AA is, because SSAA and MSAA are basically "render this at a higher resolution" and post process AA like FXAA and MLAA are pixel shader operations. View distance may just be a consequence of having to render CPU controlled objects, because I don't think display list complexity will grow that badly just because you told the renderer to render more objects.

 

Also I have to point that (urgh, time to be that guy) to an OS, logical cores and physical cores have no separate meaning. A quad core processor has four logical cores. A dual core processor with two-way simultaneous mulithreading has four logical cores. Maybe modern games are finally having more threads ready to run?

Quote

 

I saw a video where a guy used an i3 on Rise of the Tomb Raider and turned the graphics WAYYY down but still was unable to get smooth framerates. he then upped to an I5 and turned graphics up and was still able to get a good smooth experience. (I forget which exact gpu he was using, but it was decent enough)

TechSpot ran an article that showed a lot of CPUs, down to even an Athlon X4 860K, could maintain an average of at least 60FPS on a high end card at 1080p (granted it wasn't low end settings, but I'll take what I can get).

[Zyndo]

11 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

TechSpot ran an article that showed a lot of CPUs, down to even an Athlon X4 860K, could maintain an average of at least 60FPS on a high end card at 1080p (granted it wasn't low end settings, but I'll take what I can get).

I turned down clocks on my 6700k and disabled cores and hyperthreading and whatnot. got it all the way down to a Pentium G4400 before I noticed any detrimental performance to my games that I tested it in (with consistently maxed graphics). and even then it was largely because it was just bottlenecking my GPU at that point, rather than any direct CPU hindrance. Granted I don't really have a ton of modern titles, but still i can attest that there IS some validity to that statement.

 

But in games that need CPU performance to excel, and with settings that scale well with extra CPU headroom, you're going to see a pretty big difference between a 6100 and 6600. Not going to be every scenario by any means, it probably won't even be most scenarios and games. But there IS a difference.

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Also I have to point that (urgh, time to be that guy) to an OS, logical cores and physical cores have no separate meaning. A quad core processor has four logical cores. A dual core processor with two-way simultaneous mulithreading has four logical cores.

I'm aware of this. but the actual performance that you can get out of a artificial core vs a real core can vary quite a bit (even if they're at the same frequency). and if half of your operating cores aren't up to snuff, and your game really needs them to be, then you can take a real shitkicking in the fps side of things. Again, this won't be all games and probably wont even be MOST games... but when it matters, its going to matter a lot. I've heard that Far Cry 4 (at least at launch) doesn't even run the game if you don't have 4 real cores. it straight up doesn't start if you're using an I3 or a Pentium. (there are online hacks and stuff for workarounds, and perhaps they have a fix for it by now, but thats just one example where an I3 vs I5 is significantly different simply because of the way they're designed)

 

19 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I'm not convinced AA is, because SSAA and MSAA are basically "render this at a higher resolution" and post process AA like FXAA and MLAA are pixel shader operations.

MOST AA types are handled by the GPU, especially nowadays. but in its infancy AA was often dealt with, or at least partially managed by the CPU. Many things are being thrown onto more powerful GPU's nowadays rather than letting the CPU do it (things like alot pf physics calculations). AA is one of these things.

 

25 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

View distance may just be a consequence of having to render CPU controlled objects, because I don't think display list complexity will grow that badly just because you told the renderer to render more objects.

Render distance can trash a CPU. CPU's largely control AI behavior and game mechanics and how things interrelate. if you increase the scale and distance at which your CPU now has to do this, it can add up very quickly. Now most games don't let you set the render distance far enough for it to really matter, but with a weak enough CPU and a heavy enough game... it all adds up.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Zyndo said:

Render distance can trash a CPU. CPU's largely control AI behavior and game mechanics and how things interrelate. if you increase the scale and distance at which your CPU now has to do this, it can add up very quickly. Now most games don't let you set the render distance far enough for it to really matter, but with a weak enough CPU and a heavy enough game... it all adds up.

I still think it would depend on how the game is designed because it would be extremely wasteful to render CPU controlled objects that are not within a practical interactive distance. For example, The Elder Scrolls only renders a certain number of cells and everything that goes on in the game world only happens in those cells. But the rendering distance is effectively a lot longer than those cells. Oblivion let you disable that, but Skyrim doesn't. And even for a games like Saints Row or GTA, I don't believe they actually render any CPU controlled entities until you're close enough.

 

Like for instance, if we take this screenshot:

I highly doubt the game is simulating anything beyond a certain distance and anything resembling traffic is just an animation.

 

And even then I'm dubious as to how intensive this is, considering how well STALKER can simulate its world on a semi-global scale using a single core from the late 2000s. Ditto with Sim City 4 (albeit it used a terrible pathfinding algorithm to begin with...)

[Zyndo]

Perhaps i'm using the wrong term for it. but whatever. I'm not interested in discussing this further. go ahead and game on i3's. gl with that.