Hello!

I am a former lurker of this site and finally decided to out myself.
As to what moved me to finally post something is the rather inconclusive results i am getting in researching Intels 4-core Flagships gaming performance vs Intels 6 core CPUs in recent games.
I myself eventually settled on X79 RIVBE with an i7 4930k and am more than happy with it,
but still i would like to
know if the 3930k or the 5930k would have made a big difference compared to the 4790k,
with the 3930k being the cheapest option and having the least "features" and X99 having all the bling from the future(will see about that DDR4 tho ).

Basically, the question is - are 6 cores becoming a viable factor in gaming and could you do one of your brilliant comparison reviews by pitting the i7 4790k vs one of the six-core Goliaths?
Thank you very much in advance for your replies!

Best regards,

Marijan

Edit: As to this thread being a question and a request to you guys i did not know where to put it - so i want to apologize if i misplaced this thread in advance.

Hello Marijan! I moved the thread to CPU section

Well honestly I think that i7-4930K is still a great CPU and an upgrade to X99 is mostly useless if we are talking about gaming perfomance. Only few games are able to push and use all 6-cores (like ArmA), most of them runs good also on quad-core. I had a 2500K and now I'm on 5820K and honestly I don't see any difference in single GPU.

In addition next summer there will be new CPUs from Intel based on LGA1150 as well as a new chipset (Z170). If you use your rig just for gaming, I suggest to keep your X79 or sell it for Z170 next summer. Z170 will be the new Z97, so should be cheaper than X99.

Regarding the comparison, I'm sure that we will do

Hi and a warm welcome to our forums Marijan!

The article you suggested is already planned

In general the findings of our CPU gaming performance articles are always the following way: Since we max out details, the VGA becomes the bottleneck in a gaming system. In this case the CPU only plays a secondary role not being able to push frame rates by more than 5 to max 10%. If you'd be testing a setup with a low resolution, such as 720p and low details you'd see that performance scales with the CPU. In this case the VGA isn't the bottleneck anymore, now the CPU is the limiting factor.

In the real world the latter example doesn't make sense. If somebody plays games on a computer, then that person is automatically going to max out the settings to a point where the system can run it smoothly. In the case of a "normal" PC frame rates will then be somewhere in the range of 30 to 120fps. To put things in a very general way: when frame rates are in this range the VGA is bottlenecking performance, again meaning the CPU has no major influence on performance.

Today's games are able to handle four cores in an efficient way. Regarding the two CPUs you mentioned: the 4790K supports Hyper Threading and therefore there are eight virtual cores available to the operating system. Applications/games, that support up to eight or more cores scale rather well with CPUs that support HT. Apart from that there is absolutely no game, which benefits from more than eight cores. Which in the end leaves the conclusion that today a Core i7-4790K is more than enough for gaming.

The bottom line usually also goes like this: if you want to build a punchy gaming PC and your budget isn't unlimited then you better save a few bucks on the CPU and spend that money on a more powerful GPU.

I hope this answer was helpful. Keep hitting us with questions if you have more