Do CPUs really affect gaming ?

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alexelgayar

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Aug 27, 2015
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An i7-6700k build with a gtx 970 costs about $1100.

An i5-3330 build with the same gtx 970 costs about $500.

We got 2 builds with the same graphics card. One is $600 cheaper than the other.

Will the performance of both pcs be the same ? Are those extra $600 worth the i7 built ? Does the i7 build performe twice as the performance of the other build ? What are the advantages of the i7 build ?

Thanks for any helpful reply and sorry for my bad english its not my primary language.
 
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utroz


No the extra $600 is not a "waste" of money but it might be more than what you need. The i7 6700K is a good chunk faster even running at the same speed as the i5 3330 in both single thread and multithread workloads (it will cream it in multithread). Most games(especially older ones) are single thread performance sensitive and might use up to 4 threads, this is slowly changing with new games using Vulkan and DX12 which make it easier to use more cores and threads. The i7-6700K is overclockable and you can get a nice free performance boost with pretty much any Z170 board, it also supports Hyper Threading...
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bliq

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the answer lies with "what bottlenecks what?". And that depends on a couple things. some games are CPU intensive and that's where the bottleneck is. In that case, the i7 would be faster, maybe not double the speed though. most games are GPU intensive and the limit of the GPU is reached before the limit of either of the CPU is reached, in which case performance will be similar.

The benefit of the i7 is not really in gaming, it's more for general computing- productivity, video/audio work, compression, that sort of thing.
 
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utroz

utroz

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The cpu does effect gaming and it can be quite a bit depending on the game. The 6700K even running stock will be quite a bit faster than the i5-3330 in cpu intensive games. An i7 is overkill for most games as the performance boost is not worth the extra $100 or so it will cost over the i5 6600K. So I would swap the 6700K for the 6600K and call it good.
 
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azaran

azaran

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It depends entirely on the game. Some are more GPU heavy, some are more CPU heavy.

Personal example: Prior to my current build I had an i7 920. First generation i7. I had it with a GTX 770, and would get ok frame rate on games. I then loaded that same game on to my htpc using integrated graphics on an AMD APU. The htpc proceeded to destroy my i7 gaming rig in frame rates. Turns out TF2 was a very heavy CPU usage game.

The i7 will allow for multi threading. Nice if you need it, not really an factor if you don't. The i7-6700k will also run single threaded applications (most games) better than the i5-3330. Also the i7 will give you the option of over clocking.

Aside from the improvements in the CPU, going with a modern build will also give you faster RAM, more RAM capacity, better USB options, better SATA and PCIe storage options, better integrated sound.
 
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utroz

utroz

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No the extra $600 is not a "waste" of money but it might be more than what you need. The i7 6700K is a good chunk faster even running at the same speed as the i5 3330 in both single thread and multithread workloads (it will cream it in multithread). Most games(especially older ones) are single thread performance sensitive and might use up to 4 threads, this is slowly changing with new games using Vulkan and DX12 which make it easier to use more cores and threads. The i7-6700K is overclockable and you can get a nice free performance boost with pretty much any Z170 board, it also supports Hyper Threading which is useful in multithreaded workloads. The Z170 boards also support much newer tech like NVME and M.2 for SSD's, more SATA 3 ports directly on the chipset, it has more USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports (type A and type C), DDR4 for higher RAM speeds and DDR3 is starting to cost more than DDR4 and the price difference will only get higher, and many more useful features that speed up your system on a whole. I think that in your case an i5 6600K will give you most of the performance and features of the i7 6700K while being much cheaper (it's factory clocks are slightly lower and it lacks Hyper-Threading and has 2MB less L3 cache but other than that is the same) . Either Skylake cpu (6600K or 6700K) is much more future proof than the i5 3300.
 
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