
Battlefield 4
Last quarter, we cycled in the newest edition of EA’s Battlefield franchise. But of course, we're lacking the data for my $650 machine from two quarters ago. As a result, I'm going to call upon Battlefield 3 one more time for the sake of drawing a three-way comparison.

Signs of the Core i5-based machine's superiority disappear as I crank graphics quality up to the game's Ultra preset, where both rigs pack enough graphics muscle for playable frame rates at 1920x1080. Neither survives 4800x900 without reducing settings, however.

Battlefield 3
At the high resolutions we're most interested in, frame rates in our Battlefield 3 single-player test sequence are typically limited by graphics performance, and not by modern CPUs. To better reflect the graphics loads you'll experience in-game, we shoot for an average of about 45 frames per second as our target.

At our lowest settings, my current build's overclocked GeForce GTX 770 appears bottlenecked by the multiplier-locked Core i3 processor, whereas the $800 PC simply bumps up against the game’s maximum cap of 200 frames per second.

Even in stock form, my newest effort remains viable through Battlefield 3’s Ultra quality preset, including 4800x900. In comparison, the $650 machine’s GeForce GTX 760 required hefty overclocking to eke out playable frame rates in Surround.
- A More Affordable Gaming Alternative
- CPU And Cooler
- Motherboard And Memory
- Graphics Card And Hard Drive
- Case, Power Supply, And Optical Drive
- Assembling My Gaming Box
- Improving High-Res Gaming By Overclocking Graphics
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Audio And Video
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Battlefield 3
- Results: F1 2012, Grid 2, and Arma 3
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And Far Cry 3
- Power Consumption And Temperatures
- Summarizing The Performance Of Three Gaming Builds
- Did I Achieve My Goals, Or Is This A Failure?
When I first saw the parts list for this build, I expected myself to be in full agreement with you. I mean, can you imagine someone suggesting paring a GTX 680 with an I3? Ludicrous. They'd be laughed out the forums. However, looking at the benchmarks for the highest settings in 1920x1080 and 4800x900, I found there were 2 types of results
1. Those where the I3 and the GTX 770 build beat, or were within a few FPS of the I5 and R9-280X build:
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 4
Arma 3
Far Cry 3
2. Those where the I5 and R9-280X beat the I3 and GTX 770 build by a significant margin, but where all frame rates were well above 60FPS:
F1 2012
Grid 2
Skyrim
So, while overall performance percentage charts might put the I3 and GTX 770 behind the I5 and R9-280X behind in certain games, in a real-life setting, it seems that the I3 and GTX 770 is an equally good build. Which is really not what I was expecting.
Citations desperately needed. The XBOX 360 had 3 hyper-threaded CPUs and the PS3 had a 7-core cell CPU, but this didn't push PC games during this period beyond dual cores. Indeed, as late as January 2012, Tom's hardware was finding it impossible to recommend any Quad-core AMD processors over intel Dual-core processors and as late as December 2012, dual-core Intel pentiums were taking the low-end recommendations, as they were still better at gaming at this point than 4-core AMD processors. Indeed, it wasn't until February 2013 that they reversed this recommendation, so any assumption that consoles having more cores will result in P.C. games using more cores doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
As explained on page 1, the whole idea here with this build was to spend less on the platform, more-than covering the premiums on graphics, RAM, and ODD vs. our last purchase.
Sure we'd go i5 if priced the same. But the -3330 is $60 more @ $190, just like the -3470 used last quarter. The -3350P saves $10 off that. H61 doesn't save much, starting $5-10 below H81, and then we'd give up capitalizing on the i5's limited overclocking.
I was surprised to see i3 didn't yield any meaningful drop in minimum fps, at all! In fact, minimums often appeared GPU-bound, and the new GTX 770 rig won out, especially OC'ed. System bound at 70+ fps and up full-time in Skyrim or F1 2012 is hardly a loss, but an extra 3-8 fps consistently down low in ARMA III and Far Cry 3 could come in handy.
Well, not really. While I favored keeping Skyrim around this long for popularity, truth is it and F1 2012 (both out and both CPU/system limited) were now a bit long in the tooth and unable to challenge our cheapest rigs for a while now. I expected ARMA III to be more processor bound than it is.
Considering we do average in all resolutions, I think CPU-muscle is more than getting it's fair share of attention. What we lack I guess is a super-strenuous new CPU-bound game sequence able to exploit a weak CPU. Parts of Tomb Raider can do that actually, but not the in-game benchmark or our normal GPU-bound save-game. The TR test I use for CPUs is a bit tedious for SBM use. (EDIT: And actually some of the games we use like FC3 do exploit a WEAK CPU, it's just Core-i3 isn't weak.)
Hey we are always open to suggestions though, but for SBMs have to scale back to four easily comparable & repeatable games. Unfortunately this typically rules out MP testing.
SBMs we just can't pull off more than four games, ( I have tried.
Like I said, we are always open to benchmark suggestions. They'll need to be newer than the Witcher 2 though. =)
CPU: Intel Core i5-3350P 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($179.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-S1 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($34.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($64.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda ES 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 770 2GB Video Card ($339.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($15.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $735.93
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-26 07:50 EDT-0400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139018
the msi gfx card is $20 more than paul's selected zotac now.
and... non modular, cwt-built, 80+ bronze (not even silver) cx500 is a better choice than superflower-built rosewill capstone.. how?
The one thing these charts don't reveal, however, is the real impact of some of the productivity activities. Many of the single-threaded apps really don't take that long, so the overall impact of a lower performing CPU in that case is felt less by the user.
Contrast that to some of the multi-threaded apps. Try transcoding a 2 hour blu-ray movie or 7zipping a backup of a 20GB Skyrim Data folder. The difference in wait times between the i3 and i5 for the Skyrim Data folder zip would be over 13 minutes and for the blu-ray transcoding can take as much as an hour longer. These time differences have serious impact, and more cores/threads will definitely be appreciated in these situations.
So overall I agree with the results. The i3 is a great budget-build CPU, and this article shows you can stretch that all the way up to a GTX 770 - nice! But it's also easy to lose sight of the impacts some of the other activities can have on the time away from gaming.