New gaming with Fraps CPU

[robtor]

Hi there,

I'm going to order some upgrades this weekend and thought I'd try get some last minute input on it. I mostly play games, a little video editing but that's it. The key thing about the games part though is that I am a WoW'er and I use fraps. Just because fraps loves eating up cpu resources I am planning to go for a 1090T, and maybe overclock it to about 3.8ghz, from what I see that should be easily doable.

The question is, because I want to use fraps while running games does this seem like the best solution? I know i7's have better performance in general and I could get the 950, but if fraps is using a lot of a core or 2 would i better having the six core amd jobbie, and reserving the last 2 cores for fraps? And no, the 980x is a no go.

 

[robtor]

When playing for example Starcraft 2, which utilises 4 cores, you think the i7 would still be be better even when said cores are juggling about the fraps workload, rather than having a 1090T and setting fraps affinity to only cores 5 + 6?

 

[robtor]

Ah right the review I saw said SC2 benefits from more than 2, but that I assume is more about other windows related tasks being done elsewhere. As with the hard disks, I have 2 empty raid0 f3 disks purely for it, i'm pretty sure they wont get maxed out, infact I read that even 1 is plenty.

Anyway thanks for the advice, and what's with the aggression?

 

[robtor]

Nah, we're a pretty well ranked WoW guild and our 10-15min boss videos can be anywhere from 300mb-1gb.

Currently when I use fraps on my dual core, I go down to 10-15fps and it's pretty unplayable, infact i've wiped us a bunch of times due to miss-targetting or similar. I just want to make a rig that can be as close to untouched by the running of fraps in the background, so much so that I can leave it running non-stop through a whole raid night.

I think the i7 950 setup is coming to about £80-£100 more, so that's what I'll probably order in the morning.

 

[Raidur]

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html

"StarCraft II only takes advantage of dual cores, but still processing power plays a major role in this game. For example, the Core i3 540 processor only has half the L3 cache of the Core i5 750 and this makes the latter 27% faster when comparing the clock for clock data at 3.70GHz. "