Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today we're going to discuss a topic that's often raised when we do our big benchmark videos as many of you know we do a lot of cpu related gaming benchmarks on our channel and we often try to work out which cpu at a given price point will offer you the most bang for your buck now and hopefully in the future not that long ago I compared the very evenly matched core i5 8400 and risin 5 2600 overall the 2600 was faster once fine tuned but ended up costing more per frame making the 8400 the cheaper and more practical option for most gamers for that particular matchup I compared the two CPUs and 36 games at 3 resolutions and because we want to use the maximum in game quality settings to apply as much load as possible the geforce gtx 1080i is always our weapon of choice this helps to minimize GPU bottlenecks that can hide potential weaknesses when analyzing cpu performance the problem we found is quite a few viewers seem to get confused about why we're doing this and I suspect without thinking it through fully take to the comment section to bash the content for being misleading and unrealistic since this is something we're starting to see a bit of I thought I'd try and address the topic and hopefully explain a little better wide as we test all CPUs with the most powerful gaming GPU available at the time when testing a new CPU we have two main goals in mind firstly to work out how it performs right now and then how future-proof is it will it still be serving you well in a year or so is time for example as I mentioned a moment ago to do this accurately it all really comes down to removing the GPU bottleneck we don't want the graphics card to be the performance limiting component we're measuring CPU performance and there are a number of reasons why this is important and I'll touch on them in this video let's start by talking about why testing with a high end GPU isn't misleading and unrealistic yes it is true right now in 2018 it's very unlikely anyone is going to pair a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti with a sub $200 u.s. processor however when we pour dozens and dozens of hours into benchmarking Isetta components we aim to cover as many bases as we possibly can to give you the best buying advice that we can obviously we can only test with the games and hardware that are available at the time and this makes it a little more difficult to predict how components like the CPU will behave in yet to be released games using more modern graphics cards say a year or so down the track assuming you don't upgrade your CPU every time you buy a new graphics card it's important to determine how the CPU really performs and compares with competing products we're not GPU limited this is particularly important because while today you might pair a low-end CPU such as the Pentium G 5400 with a GeForce GTX 750 Ti in a year's time you might have a graphics card packing twice as much processing power and in two to three years who knows as another example if we compared the Pentium G 5400 to the core i5 8400 with the geforce gtx 750ti we were determined that in today's latest and greatest games the core i5 provides no real performance benefit and this means in a year or two when you upgrade to something offering performance equivalent to say a geforce gtx 1080 you're going to wonder why your GPU utilization is only hovering around 60% and you're not seeing anywhere near the performance you should be here's another example we can use from a previous video for the pentium g 4560 release I did create a GPU scaling test back in early 2017 here we see with a gtx 1050 TI that the core i7 6700 K is no faster than the Pentium processor then we see when using a gtx 1060 that the core i7 was on average 26 % faster and here we see the g 45 60 has already created a system bottleneck but we only know this because we test it with a higher-end GPU with the gtx today we set the core i7 6700k is almost ninety percent faster the g 45 60 and we are talking about a GPU here that by this time next year could be delivering mid-range light performance much like what we see when comparing the GTX 980 an gtx 1060 for example now in the example just given you might say well the g 45 60 was priced at just $64 us while the 6700 k cost three hundred and forty dollars us so of course the core i7 is going to be miles faster and well i don't disagree but this is an 18-month old example and we can see that this see 700k had significantly more Headroom back then something we wouldn't have known had we tested with only a gtx 750ti or even the 1060 you could also argue that even today at an extreme resolution like 4k there would be little to no difference between the G 4560 and 6700 K and that might be true for some titles but it won't be for others like battlefield one multiplayer as an example and it certainly won't be true in a year or two and games become even more CPU demanding additionally don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone uses ultra quality settings or targets just 60 fps there are plenty of gamers using a mid-range GPU that opt for medium to high and even sometimes low settings to push frame rates well over 100 fps and these aren't just gamers with high refresh rate 144 Hertz displays despite popular belief there is a serious advantage to be had in fast paced shooters by going well beyond 60 FPS on a 60 Hertz display but that's a discussion for another video maybe you guys can hand him to tackle that one anyway getting back to the kb lake dual core for a moment swapping out the $64 u.s. processor for something higher-end isn't really a big deal which is why we gave the ultra affordable g 45 60 a rave review in early 2017 but if we're comparing much more expensive processors such as the core i5 7600 k and risin 5 1600 x for example it's very important to test without GPU limitations jumping back to the recent Core i5 8400 vs. Verizon 5 2600 benchmark comparison featuring three tested resolutions let's take a quick look at the Mass Effect Andromeda results I have to say those performance trends look quite similar to the previous graph don't they you could almost rename 720p to GT X 1080 1080 P to GTX 1060 and 1440p to GTX 1050 Ti since so many of you suggest that those two sub $200 US CPUs should have been tested with the GPU packing a sub $300 US MSRP let's see what that would have looked like at our 3 tested resolutions now we know that the GTX 1060 has 64 percent fewer cores and a Mass Effect Andromeda that leads to around 55% for your frames at 10 P and 1440p using the core i7 7700 K clocked at 5 gigahertz and we see exactly that in these graphs from my 35 game benchmark comparing the vega 56 and geforce gtx 1070 TI graphics cards which was conducted last year the gtx 1060 sped out 61 FPS on average 10 EP and just 40 FPS at 1440p so here's where the gtx 1060 is situated on our graph in relation to the gtx 1080 TI the first red line indicates the 1% low result and the second red line the average framerate so as you can see even at 720p we are massively GPU bound here so how do I only test it with the gtx 1060 or possibly even the 1070 all the results would have shown us is that both CPUs can max out those particular GPUs in these modern titles even at extremely low resolutions in fact you could throw a core i3 8100 and rise in 320 200 jig into the mix and the results would have led us to believe that neither CPU is inferior to the core i5 8400 and risin 5 2600 when it comes to modern gaming of course there will be the odd extremely CPU intensive title that shows a small deepen performance for those lower end CPUs but the true difference would be masked by the weaker GPU performance I know some people believe that reviewers test with extreme high-end GPUs and an effort to make the results more entertaining but come on guys that one's actually a bit too silly to entertain as I've said the true intention is trying to turn which product will serve you best in the long run not to keep you on the edge of your seat for an extreme benchmark battle to the death as for providing more real-world results by testing with a lower end GPU I'd say unless we test it with a range of GPUs at a range of resolutions and quality settings you're not really going to see the kind of real-world results many of you claim testing with the mid-range GPU would deliver given the enormous and unrealistic undertaking that kind of testing would be for any more than a few select games the best option is to test with a high end GPU and if you can do so at two or three resolutions as this mimics GPU scaling performance anyway don't get me wrong it's not a dumb suggestion testing with Laura and graphics cards it's just a different kind of test I also feel like though suggesting this test of doing so from somewhat of a narrower viewpoint for example playing Mass Effect Andromeda over the gtx 1060 but using medium quality settings we'll see the same kind of framerate you'll get with the gtx 1080i using the ultra quality settings so don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone is going to play under the same conditions as you some people use the ultra quality settings and are happy with low frame rates while others will go all the way down to medium because they want to see high frame rates so given that gamers have a wide and varying range of requirements we do our best to use a method that covers as many bases as possible and well given the GPU limited testing tells us little to nothing and that is something we try to avoid when testing CPU performance and that is going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content if you appreciate the work we do here at hammer on box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you next time