Gadgetory

a lots been happening when it comes to processors a lot of folks have found ways to overclock non overclocking processors from Intel that's anything with a non case queue on the new skylake platform through the help of motherboard manufacturers making special B clock or BL CK overclocking profiles and BIOS that folks were able to install on their motherboards and get much better performance out of their non overclocking processors but unfortunately in the very same timeframe that all of this really started to kick off Intel has announced that it is upgrading the micro code for the processors to close that loophole and no longer allow people to overclock their non overclocking processors so given all that that just happened with Intel and the amount of messages I get from folks asking me what kind of processor they really need in a gaming system I thought today we would go ahead and answer that fabled old question of do you need a high end overclocking processor to build a gaming machine if you're anything like me then you're really into self learning I am just a knowledge sponge I don't like to watch TV I like to learn stuff when I have downtime and if that's the kind of person than you are then go ahead and check out today's sponsor lynda.com slash J that's you know my link to let them know that I sent you but lynda.com is amazing resource with thousands of online tutorials and even thousands more written tutorials about all sorts of subject matter doesn't matter graphics design web design programming 3d printing just all sorts of stuff up there and the best thing about Lynda calm is you get to learn about what you want to learn about when you want to learn about it at the pace you want to learn it so you can do it in downtime you can do it on your break at school or at lunch and just create a knowledge machine inside your head if you head over to Linda comm / J right now you can try it all out for free and give you full access to their thousands of online tutorials so at the end of this video head on over there start a free trial and member lindakhaas last J it's how they know that I said yeah that's kind of important okay so we're going to do two things with this video one we're going to do some talking head and talking hand portion of this video where I kind of give you some high-level advice when it comes to processor selection for gaming systems and then we're going to try and do a little real-world test here now I got to start by saying that there are a lot of factors there is no cut-and-dry yes or no you don't need a strong overclocking or high-end processor to enjoy games there are so many variables out there that this video is going to serve as just sort of a guideline to try and help you arm yourself with the information you need to make that decision without relying on someone like me to tell you what to buy because that doesn't really teach you anything remember teach a man to fish wait no wait I forgot oh yeah give a man a fish he eats for a day or in my case one snack teach a man to fish then there's always more fish in the sea something like that teach a man to fish and you feed him for life that's it that's what I was looking for so the very first thing you have to ask yourself when it comes to building a gaming computer is what types of games you like to play most know if you're like most gamers you like them all you like MMORPGs maybe you like RFPs you like RPGs you like simulators it really is going to depend on the type of gaming that you want to do now all games are created differently games are not created equal in fact multiple games from the same developers won't even necessarily have the same amount of processor load they all use different types of engines and it's really going to depend on what type of game that it is for instance if you're doing an FPS or first-person shooter the only thing the CPU really has to do is load the map once and then all it has to do is kind of calculate the information being sent over the internet to where the enemy is when did he shoot with this object is here this object blew up it's not a whole lot of information there because it's fairly pre-rendered when the map is loading that's why you have a loading screen when you go into the game but the fact that it only has to load that one map which is only that one section you know so you know in battlefield you try to fly out of bounds you just it stops you it kills you or if you just keep going because of a bug you eventually hit the end of the world and you kind of fall through a black hole and everything glitches out so you really don't have a lot of information that the CPU is tasked with dealing with but if you move into a very large sandbox type game let's say something like Skyrim or Witcher 3 where it's just kind of endless or at least seems like it's endless and the computer is constantly having to load different segments of maps as you around there's a lot more load happening on the processor that reminds me back to the old days and I know a lot of you are still planning it flight simulator 10 or fsx was very CPU intensive in fact you could buy the best graphics card on the market and you would see no improvement whatsoever to the overall gameplay or simulator play inside of fsx because the CPU was tasked with doing all of it so the point here is it really depends on the game and the way it was designed to run by the developers typically games that are console ports are not going to be very CPU intensive because unfortunately they are designed to run on the lesser spec box that you would find in your living room like a ps4 or Xbox one or even lesser like an Xbox 360 and then it's kind of gimped on PC now game developers have really taken a lot of heat from the PC master-race crowd or the you know enthusiasts of PC saying that they want to utilize the amount of horsepower that they have to get the eye candy after all that's one of the best things about gaming on PC is the fact that you have so much more eye candy in so much more performance so if you play a lot of games that turn out to be console ports then you can get away with a much lesser non overclocking PC but if you're going to start dealing with things like modded Skyrim or modded minecraft minecraft' runs on Java and it's very intensive on the CPU when you start running things like shader mods and texture mods so even when I was playing Minecraft and I was trying out all the different shader mods and texture mods even though I have three tight mixes only one of them work with minecraft though there's no SLI support it was very CPU intensive because the CPU is having to do all of the all of the rendering of the world and all of those individual blocks it really becomes CPU intensive games like World of Warcraft having very high-end graphics cards are going to help with things like light bloom and and different you know render distances and things like that when it comes to the eye candy but the overall impact of the world is happening on the processor now in reality you don't need a high-end hyper-threading overclocking processor speaking of Intel at least in this instance here you don't really need that to get a good gaming experience so we're going to do right now is we're going to go ahead and play some Grand Theft Auto 5 but we're going to do a first test here with my 59 60 X full overclocked right now which is at 4.5 gigahertz and we are going to see you know how it plays with all 16 threads and then we're going to get bit down to 4 cores with no hyper threading so we're going to try to simulate something closer to an i5 it's not going to be apples to apples because it still has that massive cache on there but you were going to see going from 16 threads to 4 by cutting the you know technically the processing power in by 75% and we're going to see how well it performs technically we're cutting it more than that because we're going to get rid of those extra threads as well as the overclock so let's see how it does all right so I know it's hard to see but here is all 16 logical processors going right now on the 59 6 yet ok so I have all settings on Macs I'm running a 13 or 34 40 by 1440 piece screen right here all sync technology off now I chose story mode because it's much more consistent as far as I'm concerned when it comes to you know online mode depends how many people are in the maps with a lot of variables so anyway I am using story mode right here um this guy gonna hit me nope I as you can see we're running about 95 FPS right now that is with all three graphics cards going at the moment this guy's flipping me off how rude yeah that's why I thought there we go yeah here Oh wrap maybe we'll do a little benchmark right now was it the benchmark run we'll see what our average FPS is I guess I don't know my own strength okay hey Ellen to me and that's okay this is just a normal day on the boardwalk how we make this is how we clear the path meant to do that and to do that oh god pull oh I am dangerous oh ow get in the car get in the car ah I didn't work out so well all right so our average FPS on that was 106 so let's go ahead and take off those threads and see how it does our CPU usage as you can see here was fluctuating in the 30s down to the 20s that went all the way down to what 10 at one point max CPU usage percentage was only 41 percent of the CPU being used and that's one of the things that made me decide to do this video today and I'll explain why at the end Windows updates all right in the BIOS here I put the CPU ratio back to auto uncor ratio we now want to turn off the additional cores and I'm really sure you can do that with this motherboard things I should have probably checked before I start at home oh yes here it is so it's called active cores control so we've got core 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 & 7 so what we're going to do now is we are going to leave on 0 1 2 & 3 will turn off 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & hyper-threading is disabled so now we've got basically an i5 with a lot of cash I don't mean money ok so it's probably hard to see but I promise you it has 4 cores now running no hyper-threading 20 megabytes of cash obviously that's quite a bit more than a standard I 5 what 6600 has what 6 Meg's of cash anyway yeah so again it's not apples to apples but it we're trying to see if there how much difference there is here in performance well the first thing I noticed is that loading time didn't really seem to change its make sure all my graphics settings stayed how I had them ethics yep everything's still pretty much maxed out vsync off good and go back to our story mode it's always fun to me I don't know why it's just fun to walk up to someone randomly and just smack him upside the head it's hilarious where is my bike hey guys look like Marshawn Lynch all right so I'm gonna get in a car this time oh this guy's about to pull me out of the car oh crap this is bad news oh here we go Guinea coming through pardon me okay my dogs dead get out the way now I always just seemed so violent this is only necessary I'm kind of trying to repeat what I did the first time although I'm not in the motorcycle wow guys run sideways they'll run down the sidewalk run sideways there's someone stuck in my hood hide me hide me hide me oh crap ant yep there we go you shoot the tail rotors of the helicopters you can make him crash okay not in a shooting man whoa oh yeah what just happened oh well it happened kind of the same way again the cop crashed into me and killed me all right average FPS on that one was 82 so we dropped about 24 FPS going from all those threads and overclocked two all the way down to three gigahertz and theoretically a knife I've so let's talk about that now what exactly should you take from this video will one there's lots of different ways this test could have been done and there are ways that it can be manipulated to kind of prove both methods it could prove that CPU makes very little difference to gaming and it can be proved like I just showed right here where depending on your configuration and the game it can definitely impact CPU usage in fact the CPU usage when we went down to the four threads and 3.0 gigahertz at no overclocking whatsoever we saw that the CPU usage jumped from the 40 percent range up to the 90 percent range and maxing out 99 on the chart so there are times when the FPS or the CPU was being completely maxed out but what I want to point out is I didn't notice any jittering or stuttering when that was happening so I don't know exactly what was making it max out but it did not affect the overall performance of the game at all now a lot of folks get confused when they look at their CPU usage when they're gaming and they think my CPU is only doing 30% or only 40% what's wrong I get a lot of emails from folks wanting to know why their CPUs are not going to a hundred percent when they're gaming well ultimately that's kind of a bad thing that would mean that your CPU is falling behind the tasks that it's being well tasked with when it comes to generating and computing the game for you and that means that you're going to start seeing bottlenecks and other sorts of performance failures in the future as games progress your CPU is going to start falling more and more behind meaning you're gonna have to turn down I candy and settings on your game just to make it playable when someone message means when when people message me and say their CPU only shows 40 or 50 percent usage that's actually a good thing and that means that you have a lot of headroom and room to grow in the future as games become more demanding and the reason why I say you should always get the fastest processor you can afford that you know as reasonable at least I think even the non overclocking i7 would be worth it in my opinion over an i-5 is that as CPU technology progresses and they get faster and faster the demand on them is going to get greater and greater as games progress as well gaming manufacturers and developers I said manufacturer really they're building games as they're making and programming these games they are going to try and utilize the hardware that's available at that time so if you get something that's you know barely cutting it now three four or five years in the future you're you're definitely not going to be cutting it or at least you're going to find yourself really diminishing the amount of eye candy and gameplay experience that you're getting because your hardware is falling behind it's just kind of a quick test to get you get you thinking I want to get you guys thinking I don't want to just hand you all the answers I want to get you thinking but get the best processor that you can afford but depending on the games that you're playing you definitely are going to want to get a good graphics card as well those two have to work together to give you a good gaming experience if you get it very high in CPU and a very low-end GPU you're not going to get a great gaming experience likewise if you get yourself you know an i3 or a Pentium Edition processor and you get yourself something like a Titan X or a dual graphics card and then you put it on something like GTA 5 or Skyrim with mods again you have that badass graphics card but your processor is going to become the point of which you are having diminishing returns with your hardware so you've got to find a balance there anyway guys hope you've enjoyed today's video let me know what you guys think if you want me to do this test again with other titles let me know maybe we will revisit it with other graphics cards and things but for now it is time to get out of here thanks for watching my first video in the new office it's very roomy and not nearly as hot as the other one was and I'm very thankful for that time to get out of here guys as always we'll see you in the next video