What can you do with a good CPU?
- Thread starter Sharks445
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Danbuscus25
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Anything that doesn't require much from the GPU side. If the recommended requirements are for graphics from several years ago, you are fine.
hang-the-9
Titan
- Mar 25, 2010
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Best thing for an i7 is media encoding, anything similar that takes a lot of CPU power to go though.
I have an i7-2860QM in my workstation laptop at work with a solid state drive and it goes though HD encoding of BluRay disks very nicely. Takes a lot less time to get a good quality conversion at Medium speed in Handbrake than it did on a i5 laptop I used before.
maddogfargo
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Eggz
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When I got my 3930k, I had the same question. From reading more than I should have, anything computationally demanding will benefit. That covers a lot of stuff. You can run a huge calculation over the max amount of cells in Excel, using a really complicated formula that iterates across a huge matrix. But it doesn't have to be that nerdy. When you get a good graphics card, you can run games that keep track of a lot of data (e.g. Crysis 3, RPGs with many characters, FPS with many players, etc). Media production and manipulation also benefits. You'll be able to export photo edits and video clips that you make yourself, and you'll also be able to handle programs without GPU acceleration. Adobe Lightroom is all CPU-driven, and some of the editing on RAW photo files will really bog down CPUs that aren't up to snuff, especially when you apply many local edits on specific parts of a photo rather than to the entire photo.
In order to take advantage of heavy CPU usage, you'll need a lot of RAM. I just maxed mine out to 32GB because I would run out of RAM when I had 16GB. If you are into panoramic photography, you'll really see a difference with that 4770 using a lot of RAM. Again, though, that's just an example of something that does computations on a large piece of information. Panoramas are easily more than 1 or 2 GB on a drive, and manipulating them requires many times more RAM. Effectively managing all that information will rely on your CPU.
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