Is the future i7 or i5

[DurgeDriven]

PC is much more then rFactor2 isnt it?

For some of course others not so much.

Is the future i7 - i5 can be posed from many angles.

The OPs was :

...when used for just racing simulators

.......future of simulator software

I well understand the significant gains i7 can make in most every application .......if you happen to use them.

I still say after running a Samsung Evo with rFactor2 it is the worse bang for buck for sims ever............but others think I am nutters. lol

 

[WhiteShadow]

For some of course others not so much.

Is the future i7 - i5 can be posed from many angles.

The OPs was :




I well understand the significant gains i7 can make in most every application .......if you happen to use them.

I still say after running a Samsung Evo with rFactor2 it is the worse bang for buck for sims ever............but others think I am nutters. lol

Yes DD you are right if PC is only used to sims go for i5

 

[DurgeDriven]

Yes DD you are right if PC is only used to sims go for i5

It is not so much it is only for sims.

Mmm what do I do lol

I dunno really mate, Browse, post, download addons and historic car pics, watch VLC, listen to WinAmp, watch utube full races all motorsports.
I do screenshots , run online rF2, edit in photofiltre, ConvertXtoDVD rarely, burn on Nero every now and then.

Use sims and run online mainly, a few older games when I get bored.......... since I now have a GTX970 I can run them all turned up max, don't need more fps as it is

I download all sims addons a day then probably spend 10 mins winrarring all of it........ yes I could save 5 minutes a day with a i7 there.

Which is about as much as a SSD saves me I reckon. ie: I boot F3-rookies and rF2 once leave room up for 8 hours
SSD probably saved me 15 seconds and does absolutely nothing for game performance over a black caviar.

Depends on your situation lets say

 

[Jokeri]

i5 will do just fine. Put your money to good GPU

 

[Nuno Lourenço]

Stock Intel 6600 won't even bottleneck a GTX980Ti lool

Everyone will tell you to get a K , spend more, money on mobo, ram and cooling. BS lol

i5@3.9GHz ANY single card up to 2560.............not a worry in the world

If you want to 4K or multi screen then you can start talking to me about i7 and overclocking.

That statement its not the reality Durge, with higher resolution less bottleneck a CPU will cause.

I doubt that a 2600K even with PCI-E 2.0 running a 4.0ghz will bootleneck anything, I mean, it may but will it take fps to less than 60fps even with 20 cars??? I doubt it even at triple screen with a 980 Ti.

 

[burgesjl]

I'm preparing to replace my gaining first gen i7 on an ASUS P6 with a new system, so the i5 v i7 debate is an interesting one.

In my view you have three elements: the CPU, the GPU and the communication path between the two, that can all become bottlenecks.

Performance has improved a lot in rF2 over the last couple of years, and this seemed to be a combination of areas but mainly on the pure GPU side. It isn't maxing out the CPU but then again there's still mainly one thread doing all the work. I suspect there was a lot more going on with transferring data from main memory to GPU memory and getting the GPU to do more of the computation work, which is the basis of the improvements. That's why one of the posters was seeing big performance increases when running PCI 3.0 rather than 2.0 (which is the max my PC has). rF2 is pretty quick at loading up new cars/tracks to run a session compared to other games, but anything you can do in this space helps and an SSD really does benefit this; it clearly does not much at all when the game is running but it helps startup. The question is, where is rF2 going to go next? Will they implement DX11/12, will they find ways to have more threads? There would seem to be scope for both. The DX9 API is extremely limited in supporting better multithreading, so that's an area of concern.

pCARS recently introduced running physics with each tire on its own thread. I think this might continue. At the moment, most of these games still seem to rely on a minimal number of threads. As this increases, having a CPU that can handle more threads would seem to be an advantage, hence would suggest an i7 over an i5. Most obvious area here is improvement in AI. We already know the physics models applied to AI cars is different/simpler than that applied to your own car - its why we sometimes see odd differences and unbalance in AI to what real drivers do. Never mind the actual improvement in their offense/defense and making mistakes of the racing logic part.

My main game is iRacing. This is currently - even with my setup - CPU-limited. It takes much longer still than rF2 to startup a session, the SSD helped there but still there seems to be an enormous amount of computation going on during initialization (I also think its recompiling shaders each time). I'd love to know more about the benefits of PCI 3.0 in this game. They are also about to move to DX11 which will again change the relative performance equation, and I have to think they will do the same as pCARS and have threads per tire in physics eventually. This game also seems to utilize only a couple of cores.

So my summarization is: probably an i5 with a better GPU is the best combination for right now. However, there still may come a point where having more cores/more threads may end up being advantageous with future game developments, and I think sims have a lot of scope for this compared to other AAA games i.e. they are less advanced in this area than they should be/could be. If that ever happens you might rue not having an i7. This is a bit more of a concern for me, because I am on a much longer upgrade cycle than perhaps many nerds would be (mine will be 6 years for CPU/mobo, whereas I replace GPUs every 1-2 years, effectively 3 generations). It seems like we are finally going to get a major revolution in this upcoming year with 14nm GPUs and HBM and huge GPU memory size and bandwidth: this is what will mainly drive my upgrade because I see no point putting one of those on an old CPU/main memory/PCI bus. But that'll be gaggingly expensive I'm sure, and scrimping a bit to use an i5 rather than i7 may be sensible savings that don't impede much.

 

[peterchen]

pCARS recently introduced running physics with each tire on its own thread.

Are you sure?
I doubt that and I doubt that it would make much sense on this "old" tyre-model.

 

[WhiteShadow]

That statement its not the reality Durge, with higher resolution less bottleneck a CPU will cause.

I doubt that a 2600K even with PCI-E 2.0 running a 4.0ghz will bootleneck anything, I mean, it may but will it take fps to less than 60fps even with 20 cars??? I doubt it even at triple screen with a 980 Ti.

You don`t buy 980Ti and run PCI-e 2.0 . Everything below i5 4690k is bottleneck to 980Ti

 

[DrR1pper]

You don`t buy 980Ti and run PCI-e 2.0 ....

Only for rf2 so far as we can tell based on numerous benchmarks comparing performance of cards at different pci-e modes. For example, PCI-e 1.1 x16 (equivalent to 3.0 x2) vs 3.0 x16 produced practically identical scores in 3dmark. I tested and confirmed this for myself with gtx 970.

...Everything below i5 4690k is bottleneck to 980Ti

i5 3000 series are pci-e 3.0 compatible too.

 

[WhiteShadow]

You don`t buy 980Ti and run PCI-e 2.0 . Everything below i5 4690k is bottleneck to 980Ti

Sorry I made typo I meant I5 3690K

Only for rf2 so far as we can tell based on numerous benchmarks comparing performance of cards at different pci-e modes. For example, PCI-e 1.1 x16 (equivalent to 3.0 x2) vs 3.0 x16 produced practically identical scores in 3dmark. I tested and confirmed this for myself with gtx 970.



i5 3000 series are pci-e 3.0 compatible too.

Yes you are right my mistake (typo) sorry

 

[Nuno Lourenço]

I did the test myself with a 780Ti @ 5760x1080

PCI-e 2,0@x16
Min 35
Max 68
Avg 51

PCI-e 3,0@x16
Min 43
Max 77
Avg 60

PCI-e 3,0@x16 gain
Min 23 %
Max 13 %
Avg 18 %

You are right, for rF2 Pci-e 2.0 is a limitation. Put the 2600k on a Pci-e 3.03.0 board don't solve the problem because it only suports 2.0.

 

[DurgeDriven]

That statement its not the reality Durge, with higher resolution less bottleneck a CPU will cause.

Yes it is I said...............

GTX980Ti and Stock 6600 at 1920 / 2560 will not bottleneck.


i5@3.9GHz ANY single card up to 2560.............not a worry in the world

However 2500K do start to bottleneck with later gen games and GTX980Ti............you can easy see that from the ProjectCars test and they used a Titan X
http://www.techspot.com/review/1000-project-cars-benchmarks/page5.html
You could have OC to 5Ghz would not make a difference.

But in heaps of games the 2500K will be a lot closer to the 4690, I should know I had both but in later gen stuff, W10 , etc. the 2500K starts to drop off a bit.

The 4690@3.5Ghz holds its ground anyways.

That is only one test sure, then show me one contradicting test, floor is yours, I am all ears.
Unless you talk about one of a handful of games that like hyper threading.

 

[DurgeDriven]

i5 will do just fine. Put your money to good GPU

That is probably the most concise way I could put it.

However I think a even bigger stumbling block can be overclocking for your average user.

Sure it is so easy to do these days but the bang for buck imho is just not there anymore,
especially if it comes at the cost of GPU.

Take a 6600 vs 6600K build ( Australian dollars )

6600K.................... +$30
Better Case ...........Possibly to allow for hi end hydro/water cooling +0 to $100
Better Cooling........ If you want good stable running you can at least double the cost from a BeQuiet Cooler +$45 to $150
Better Chipset ....... H170A vs Z170X +$100
Better Memory....... Corsair 2133-8GB vs Corsair 3200-16GB +$170
Better Power Supply ........ overclocking can add up to 80 watts with Skylake push you up 100watts + $20


Sure you can overclock with cheaper chipset, cooling and memory but the results will reflect this............


Like I said in previous post ............with Sandybridge you got 1300-1500MHz overclock ( I got 1700MHz with i5 ) even with air cooling under 20c ambient.

The later the chip, less they overclock, more voltage they use, the hotter they run.... which means you need the more expensive gear to extract the best.

 

[BoothJoe]

This might seem kind of silly to some...but if you're the type of person who's going to lie awake in bed at night and wonder, "You know, I wonder if that would have happened with the I7," then you should buy the I7 and put your mind at rest. I bought the I7 because I'm that kind of person. I work with Unix-based servers as an admin where research is done on high performance clusters with hundreds of cores and single jobs can take days or weeks to run, so it's not like I don't know an I5 would serve just as well in gaming. But I knew when I was shopping for a system that I needed to buy something that I wouldn't be questioning in a short time. The marketing people at Intel love people like me. One thing, though, I bought a refurbished I7.

 

[Kek700]

How true.

 

[Jokeri]

I must say my newly acquired GTX 980ti is certainly an impressive graphics card;
So much so that it is my processor that seems to throttle the pc when playing rfactor2. I know about the pci problems with my i7 2600k and p8p67 mb.

This leads me to ask for some more advice, cost is a factor, so should i go for i7 6700k processor or the i5 6600k, i do not know enough about hyper threading and the future of simulator software processes to take advantage of this to make a decision or the importance of the extra 2mb of cache.

I would prefer the i5 on cost but is the i7 really a better choice in the long run.

The i7 2600k has proved a good investment over the past 5 years and can still hold its own today.

I would probably go for the i5, as my opinion at the moment is that it will do every thing that an i7 will do when used for just racing simulators.

Any advise would be welcome.

Have you visited cpuboss.com and done some comparing between your current cpu and the ones that are in the market?

 

[Kek700]

Yes and i have carefully read every response in this forum.

I have decided to stick with my clocked i7 2600k , and live with the rfactor2 pci problems. If something occurs in the future to change my mind, i will the upgrade then or if it becomes obvious to do so.

To be honest running a gtx980ti should go someway in mitigating my percentage loss of frame rate in rfactor2 anyway.

 

[Spinelli]

Gpu 100x more fps impact then cpu.

I5 over i7 anyday. I7 is same thing just 4 virtual cores added which give, max, 30% more proc power (not 100% more, they are virtual cores not physical) but modt games dont use 4 threads let alone 8. 4 fast physical cores is more than great for 99% of games.

If you want to go i7 and more expensive board instead of i5 and lower board then forget that i7 and get non-mainstream/workstation i7 instead, like 4930k or 5930k. You get 2 more physical cores - 6 instead of 4. You get 12 cores total (6 physical, 6 virtual), instead of 8 (4 physical, 4 virtual) or 4 (4 physical). You get 40 pci-e lanes instead of 16. You get quad-channel memory instead of dual-channel.

I5 or workstation line i7 for me. No in-between.

 

[DrR1pper]

What wrong with an i6?

 

[mavericckk]

I am using amd X6 1090t running 3.8Ghz and gtx 970.
all at max ,only shadows at high and in any track I got easy 50 fps and after during the race around 80 or up fps
I am thinking in one FX 8 cores.
Pcars kill my fps, around 40fps sometimes.