Locked Skylake i5 or AMD FX Eight Core for Streaming?

ClassicYeti · Jun 18, 2016

The i5 I am planning to buy is either the 6400 or 6500 (still deciding, help maybe?) but there is also the FX series with eight cores like 8350 or 8320. Which would be best for streaming with good performance at 720p60 stream quality?

firefoxx04 · Jun 18, 2016

Get the i5. Still faster.

photonboy · Jun 18, 2016

1) Your UPLOAD speed may be an issue.

2) The type of program you ENCODE with matters (using hardware GPU decode instead of CPU uses a lot less CPU cycles).

I agree, get the i5-6500 if that's as high as you can go for budget.

*the best-case scenario for a stock FX-8350 using all threads is that it is SIMILAR in performance to the i5-6500. In other situations the i5-6500 is as high as 60% faster due to the higher per-core performance.

Colethelion321 · Jun 19, 2016

i have an i5 and it is very fast for rendering 3d, streaming, gaming, and my friend has an amd and my system beats his like CRAZY!

LeKeiser · Jun 19, 2016

Colethelion321 :

would be nice to know which AMD CPU and where does your i5 beats it like "crazy"

( <-- serious question though)

TJ Hooker · Jun 19, 2016

LeKeiser :

It almost doesn't matter, as a modern i5 should significantly outperform any AMD CPU in lightly threaded loads.

GranCracker · Jun 19, 2016

Well it depends what your going to be streaming. The skylake i5 is much faster in all games especially cpu intensive ones, and I think it'll be better for streaming. But the quality of the stream also depends on your internet connection. If I were you i'd get the i5 6500 cause it's just better and also futureproof. Remember it's the new chipset so it requires an lga1151 motherboard and DDR4 ram. I remember my friend getting a 6700k and a 1150, he wasn't very happy

DO NOT GO FOR AMD

LeKeiser · Jun 19, 2016

TJ Hooker :

he said "like crazy", I don't think it's "like crazy" in all conditions. Multithreaded apps, i5 doesn't outperform "like crazy" a 8350/8370
doesn't mean I say buy a FX, note (eventhough I did a few months ago myself)

Colethelion321 · Jun 19, 2016

TJ Hooker :

LeKeiser :

It almost doesn't matter, as a modern i5 should significantly outperform any AMD CPU in lightly threaded loads.

hahaha yes it should so "burn"

Colethelion321 · Jun 19, 2016

LeKeiser :

TJ Hooker :

he said "like crazy", I don't think it's "like crazy" in all conditions. Multithreaded apps, i5 doesn't outperform "like crazy" a 8350/8370
doesn't mean I say buy a FX, note (eventhough I did a few months ago myself)

ya it outperforms in multi threaded apps.

synphul · Jun 19, 2016

In theory the 8 cores/threads of the fx 8xxx should be superior but reality is a bit different. For instance adobe premier pro cc, h.264 encoding will use up to 10 cores efficiently.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-698/

Yet in TH's tests using premier pro to encode h.264 in premiere pro cc, the 4670k i5 4c/4t took only 1 second more than the fx 8350 and the i5 4690 encoded 4 seconds faster than the fx 8350.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-31-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC,3722.html

That's just one test but a situation where it's confirmed the software can use far more than 4 cores effectively and yet the i5 with half the cores outperformed the 8core fx. Simply stating the fx is better because it has more cores/threads and the application is 'heavily threaded' isn't always true in the real world.

In streaming, hard to say. It's hard to give a definitive benchmark result because of all the variables. Are you using a single drive, a separate drive to encode to from the source video, are you encoding while gaming, the speed of the drive(s), the speed of the upload connection, what program are you using to encode with, what settings, how many fps and at what resolution. 720p at 30fps, 1080p at 30fps, 1080p at 60fps? There are endless combinations and it would be extremely difficult to give a direct answer because of that.

Personally I would opt for the i5. If you need something more your system would already be set up to drop in an i7. If you go with amd, you're stuck with no place to go. There's no drop in replacement for the fx 8xxx that's more powerful, it's already the best of what amd offers. In order to upgrade from the fx you'll be looking at a new cpu, new motherboard, new ram most likely (ddr4 for either skylake or amd zen) and a reinstall of windows.

photonboy · Jun 20, 2016

I'll repeat that the FX-8350 at its very best can only just match the i5-6500 give or take a small amount due to the extra threads but lower performance per thread, and that the i5-6500 has about 60% higher performance per core.

In GAMES that is going to mean somewhere between NO difference and over 50% with a good GPU and this has been confirmed in benchmarks.

Aside from a small price difference (small compared to entire build cost) it's completely POINTLESS to go with the AMD solution.

Others may argue "but you can overclock" the AMD which is true, but now you have add on more money for a better CPU cooler and 400MHz over 4GHz only gives a max 10% boost anyway (theoretical, not necessarily real-world).

An i7-6700K versus i5-6500 gives both higher clocks and more threads, but the benefit depends on the application.

*In games however, there's a rough point where the amount of CPU processing tends to gain little even with a great GPU. That's roughly the i5-6500. Going above that for gaming rarely matters but does a little. In most games again, the FX CPU's see often 20% to 40% bottlenecks.

LeKeiser · Jun 20, 2016

I don't want to pollute the thread but since your posts are very interesting and clever, I just wanted to ask something related though (I think).
The fact that a FX has more cores and that it's more dedicated to multithreaded tasks, doesn't it mean that it allows the user to also have more than one application running with a better/faster output than a CPU with less core? I know that it's not the original question of the OP, but... I can encode a big video and still play without noticing any slowness or lag or... I have launched more than one application that's heavilly multhreaded and it was still fast and still allowing me to do some other stuff on the side. My old Q6600 wouldn't let me do that the same way. I know, poor comparaison but that's the only one I have right now

Golcsae13 · Jun 20, 2016

I use to have a i5 3570K OC to 4.5 GHz and it had troubles at 720p 60fps (bitrate 3300 kb/s) . I had to lower the stream to 720p 30fps for better results. I upgraded to a i7 3770 and it helped a lot. It was able to get 720p 60fps without sacrificing much quality. I can't comment on AMD though.

TerryLaze · Jun 20, 2016

LeKeiser :

Yes for someone who has no idea about how the OS works this is true,most progs will not use all 8 cores so output will be slower but the PC will not "lag" when running something else as well.
For someone who knows about multitasking OSs it's possible to use task priorities to give more CPU time to one or the other prog so you can have the balance you want without any lag.

LeKeiser · Jun 20, 2016

TerryLaze :

LeKeiser :

Yes for someone who has no idea about how the OS works this is true,most progs will not use all 8 cores so output will be slower but the PC will not "lag" when running something else as well.
For someone who knows about multitasking OSs it's possible to use task priorities to give more CPU time to one or the other prog so you can have the balance you want without any lag.

but that means that the user has to change the priorities himself, adjusting things depending on what"s running and how.
Correct? If so, that's not up to the "everyone" people...

TerryLaze · Jun 20, 2016

LeKeiser :

Yes exactly,it's up to whoever can do it but you get the most out of your system,if for example a prog only runs on 4 cores there is nothing a user can do to make it run better(make it use all cores so it runs faster) on 8 cores,if a prog runs on 8 cores there is something the user of a quad cpu can do if he wants to run other things at the same time.

LeKeiser · Jun 20, 2016

TerryLaze :

errrr... If a program needs as many cores it can to run (so 4 on a quad and 8 on a hexa), I don't see what the user of a quad can do to run other things at the same time better than if he had 8 cores...??
I mean an 8 cores CPU will handle better the other applications launched at the same time than a 4 thread application that has to use 4 cores fully than a quad core, it seems logic, right? The quad will be running full load while the 8 cores will have 4 cores "busy" and the rest doing the other stuffs.

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