Octocore cpu do i really need it

[xJVlesmerized]

So im building my first build and planned to have the new amd black octocore because its only 200$. but after a long conversation with my tech teacher at my school he said id be better off getting a nice quad core or an intel i3. he said he cant think of anyone who would need 8 cores besides someone running a server or building a monster.

so i guess what im really asking here is do i need 8 cores or would i be better off with a quad core and spending my money on a better graphics card or more ram. my budget is max 800$ and its gunna mostly be used for gameing

 

[mocchan]

Your teacher is absolutely right You're better off getting an i5 2500k/3570k and investing in a better GPU.

 

[Pinhedd]

an AMD Bulldozer core and an Intel Sandybridge/Ivybridge core are not equivalent. Each Hyperthreaded Sandybridge core gets approximately 2.5 times the Dhrystone IPS (integer arithmetic) per instruction cycle per core as a Bulldozer core.

Even if we evaluate Bulldozer on a module basis rather than a core basis (which is a bad idea considering single threaded applications will still be constrained by the integer inferiority of each Bulldozer core), Sandybridge still has a nice 25% lead.

On Whetstone basis (floating point arithmetic) Bulldozer falls even farther behind. Each bulldozer module shares a single FPU between two cores, and each Bulldozer FPU has approximately half the throughput as a Sandybridge FPU, especially when executing AVX2 instructions.

So, you shouldn't get an AMD Bulldozer CPU because it's an 8 core processor, you shouldn't get it because it's a shitty 8 core processor that is easily outdone by a 2 year old 4 core processor.