How Many Cores Do You REALLY Need? — 4 vs 6 vs 8 Cores — Begun, the Core Wars Have...

hello and welcome to tech deals for Korres six cores eight cores how are you supposed to know which to buy today we're gonna take a look at that topic with a detailed discussion at a bunch of benchmarks I've been saying for a while now that eight cores is where it's at if you want a premium experience some future proofing the ability to multitask and frankly don't want to have to worry about it then you've already got your answer you don't have to watch the rest of this although I certainly would appreciate it if you did now there are certainly different generations of eight core CPUs and we will talk about that later in this video but as a general rule if you have the money eight course the more complex question is do you actually need eight cores is whatever you're doing with the computer going to take advantage of them do you need them for current games do you need them for productivity or is it really just a future proofing thing the answer to that question is complex and deep the rabbit-hole goes down pretty far but we're gonna try to keep this crazy simple as I said if you've got the money run don't walk get eight cores do not pass go do not collect $200 although you'll need it for horizon 7 but in any case it really is the best long-term choice if your budget will allow on the other hand if your budget is tight if 50 to $100 more is a big deal if you're looking to get maximum value out of a very limited set of resources then go ahead and get a 6 core CPU a 6 core CPU will play all current games well enough and it will play most future games well enough it's not a smooth it's not going to be quite as nice it's a compromise choice but if budgets are tight and you'd otherwise spend that 50 or $100 on a better graphics card or more RAM or more storage then yeah a 6 core CPU is fine let me be 100% clear that last point is about new purchases that you're making today not about existing computer upgrade advice which is a separate conversation if you currently own a 2 or 4 core CPU and you're looking to make a new purchase today get the 8 core if you can afford it but if you already have a 6 core CPU perhaps you bought the first generation rise in 5 1600 2 and a half years ago and your question today is will 20 day course des no that's a very different point most people who have six core CPUs today I would recommend keeping them unless you're doing 4k video editing or you're trying to live stream on Twitch the latest and greatest Triple A games but for most people if you currently own a six core chip you can keep it for a while yet I would just skip it if at the end of 2019 you're making a new purchase for the most part we're discussing games when it comes to these core counts putting games aside if we're talking about productivity work such as blender if you're gonna do MATLAB simulations if you're doing 4k video editing and rendering all of those tasks generally tend to scale very well with additional cores and additional threads by all that you can afford you can absolutely run blender and you can run MATLAB and you can run a variety of productivity programs without any problem whatsoever on even a fork or chip but they'll just run much faster on six cores and faster yet again on eight and frankly if you're doing that stuff seriously allow me to introduce you to the Rison 930 900 X or maybe even 30 950 X but that's outside the scope of this video those scale will buy more if you can afford it but for games they're more of a nice to have at the moment rather than a required on the flip side when it comes to games there's the other end of the scale do you want to play Minecraft in The Sims 4 do you want to play some pinball games or maybe a casual game of World of Tanks you don't need a 6 or an 8 core CPU for that even if you're watching YouTube while you're doing it a 4 core 8 thread CPU is plenty and for some of you a 2 core 4 thread chip will do just fine is very easy to make generalized statements about oh yes games the new games need 8 core CPUs which do games fancy Triple A games such as Ghost Recon breakpoint or World of Tanks those are two very different games that have two very different hardware requirements in our testing today we have four different CPUs to show you in the charts starting at the Rison 3 1,300 X 4 core 4 thread CPU the Rison 5 1500 x 4 core 8 thread CPU the Rison 5 6 x-6 core 12 thread cpu and the rise in seven 1700 x8 core 16 thread chip they are all first-generation risin ship so the per core per clock performance is basically the same between all of them you're just getting more of them and this will let you see in a variety of games and programs some built-in benchmarks some live gameplay that I'll show you how well they scale with additional cores we are testing this today on the asou strong Strix x4 70 - eff motherboard all the CPUs were run at stock speeds we have a nice scythe Mugen 5 after market tower cooler temps are very nice on this 16 gigabytes of ddr4 32 hundred megahertz CL 16 XMP was turned on that's the only overclock that was actually applied to the system and then we used the gigabyte rx 5700 xt 8 gigabyte gaming overclocked video card which is a nice 400 or mid range option powerful enough to uplift the performance so that we're really testing the CPUs but not so powerful that everybody goes why are you putting a 1200 rrt X 28 of Ti on these things which would be silly so that's what we're using in our testing today I'll have a few more thoughts and a conclusion at the end of the benchmarks so please stick around for that make sure you subscribe for more videos like this one and with all that being said on with benchmarks our first benchmark is Assassin's Creed Odyssey these are going to be cut kind of short because I did a first voice over of these benchmarks and it was 30 minutes long I had a lot to say so we're not going to do that this time I covered the air issues with the Assassin's Creed Odyssey benchmark and the Call of Duty benchmark in previous comparisons the hyper-threading video and others so I'm really not going to get into great detail on them here other than to say that the benchmark chart you're about to see looks the way it does because of the video card and not the CPUs I will do a follow-up at some point I acknowledge the issues and that is why we're cutting straight to the chart rather than showing you the rest of the benchmark 56 51 60 62 this is all graphics card issues right here there should be a larger difference but there's not let's get to the next one call of duty black ops 4 how much CPU you need for this deeply deeply depends upon what you're doing the upper right hand corner on the 1500 X was tested on chaos domination and the other three were tested on Nuketown I know I know so ignore the 1500 X it's kind of squirrely because of it the most interesting comparison is on the left hand side between the 1300 x 4 core 4 thread and a 1600 x 6 core 12 thread now to be sure we're not using a hundred percent of the six core 12 thread CPU but it does help and most importantly it helps with smoothness and responsiveness loading and of course we are running on a pristine test bench here with nothing running in the background whatsoever and a clean install of Windows and nothing in the TAS tray which most people don't have computers like that so a 1300 X in theory will do it but I wouldn't want to do it on a real machine 94 frames per second average on the 1300 X versus 104 on the 1600 X 42 252 on the 1% low and the point 1 percent low because a responds means nothing I am interested in your feedback what is the hardest map in terms of CPU usage with the most stuttering to test I don't play this not a benchmarking so don't have that level of expertise to be able to tell you so I'm open to suggestions in the comment section below I will make sure I do the same map in future testing Counter Strike global Offensive runs on a potato stupid test for this right clearly a fork or fourth red chip running at 3.6 gigahertz is just fine prepare to be amazed this is these are replays of professional teams playing with it Auto switching between characters as they go live gameplay would be preferable but I suck at this way too much in order to make that consistent and because of the way the matches work basically just be watching other people play anyway because I would die much too quickly if you take a look at the performance numbers on the screen it's great so what's the issue well it all comes down to frame pacing smoothness input lag and responsiveness which FPS charts don't always show very well and average numbers don't show at all 174 average on the 1300 x vs 204 average on the 1700 x clearly a no-brainer but wait look at the one percent low 58 versus a hundred or more on all the others if you want smooth performance if you're a competitive player you actually do need more CPU in order to play this game now most people don't casual players this 1300 X is fine but a serious player once more far cry knew done the full price DLC - far cry 5 part of the issues here the same as Assassin's Creed Odyssey look at the clock speed of the graphics card here you're gonna see a benchmark chart that's gonna demonstrate the problem with trying to go mid range and use a quote reasonable graphics card bluntly the RX 5700 xt drivers suck six months post-launch they still suck they'll probably be great one day but they're not so when I redo this test and iron out the variables I promise you there'll be an RT X something or other on here as opposed to this graphics card which is incredibly inconsistent in how well it works there is no way in the world the game should be this close in this flat 70 or to 74 and 55 to 55 and 83 and 83 yes Pienaar TX 2070 super fortnight team rumble also plays on a potato ridiculous test for four versus six versus eight cores right well I would say prepare to be amazed but that would be a spoiler alert it does run well and for the average person who just wants to play for fun casually sure fine four cores four threads is enough but you don't need an eight core 16 friendship frankly even if you're gonna livestream this I mean frankly a six core twelfth red chip would be enough for most people it depends on how competitive you are and depends on how good you want the performance to be if you look in the upper left hand corner were at 100 frames per second and it seems fine although I will tell you it's not it just seems that way as you saw me die just there but then again some of that is my player skill 163 frames per second average on the lowly 1,300 X but if you look at the 1% low a different story appears 26 versus 71 the difference between 4 cores 4 threads and four cores 8 threads is night and day even in fortnight more and more games which previously were classified as being able to run on anything really I mean they are but how smooth of a game experience do you want if you are doing anything in the background live-streaming watching youtube videos such as this one if you are listening to music doing voice chat I would strongly strongly recommend an upgrade to at least a 6 core 12 thread CPU because while it looks like the 1500 X will do it keep in mind there's nothing else going on this machine so give yourself some Headroom and get at least something like a 1600 X they're not expensive and it will give you a better experience for longer even in games like fortnight when I first recorded this I spent 5 minutes on this game alone I went into great detail on my thoughts on the various CPUs in this game I have nearly 50 hours played in this right now across a wide variety of machines I know it's not everybody's cup of tea but I'm enjoying it so there you go what I will say is that there is a world of difference between high frame rates and smoothness and in this particular case having a smooth experience makes a big big difference it also depends upon whether or not you multitask with your computer while you're playing or you just play the game so I'll say this if you have one monitor and you just played a game and you're not running anything in the background you have a fairly clean configuration 6 cores 12 threads is where this game is that it's really all that you need you don't need eight core 16 threads if you have a clean machine with nothing else running I don't I have a second monitor I'm often watching YouTube videos or twitch streams while I'm playing listening to music browsing the web I am usually multitasking and because of that I have found that 6 cores 12 threads is not enough and it doesn't reflect in this benchmark because this is a test bench but in the real world I can tell you from experience my i7 8700 k-6 score 12 thread Intel machine at 4.7 gigahertz is choppy when I have YouTube videos or twitch streams playing on a second monitor I would much prefer to run a rise in 720 700 X even though the average frame rate will be lower it will be smoother and better handle multitasking so go for the 8 core 16 thread chip if you're doing it but you can get away with 6 cores 12 threads for the really really smooth experience for the time being I'm not even gonna bother rehashing the 1,300 X here it's atrocious and terrible and basically unplayable I followed that up with an i5 7600 K in a previous video and it's better Intel for Core 4 thread at 4.5 gigahertz was better but still it paused and hitched and wasn't that great the 1500 X looks better here this chart makes it look better than it is it's functional and playable and if I had to I would get yourself a 6 core 12th red chip if you want to play games like this the upcoming cyberpunk 2077 watchdogs legion etc you're frankly the days of for courtship are over as far as I'm concerned for those upcoming games overwatch is an interesting one it's a very well optimised game it runs on almost anything just adjust the resolution in detail settings and so long as you're not operating on a Pentium 4 from 2003 it's gonna run at some level of performance want to be competitive well you need something a bit better than that but not too high you're gonna find here that even a fork or four thread chip a mid-range one such as the 1300 X does a remarkably good job it's not perfect but it's good enough for the vast vast majority of people if you're a tournament player a professional level player well if you're not playing on that anyway or shouldn't be so who cares you could see the performance for yourself on the screen it's smooth no matter which chip we used 144 frames per second on the low-end 186 on the high-end I'd like to point out that the 1700 X was running at 3.5 gigahertz and the 1600 X was running at 3.7 gigahertz these are their stock out-of-the-box clock speeds and the reason it's faster is because of the faster clock speed because on a clean test bench overwatch doesn't care about an eight-core chip it makes zero difference whatsoever thus the better performance on the 1600 X if you overclock the 1700 X 2 4 gigahertz it would have been run faster it really is that simple now the 1500 X in the 1300 X 2 the same speed and the 1500 X is at 3.6 cards only a hundred slower than the 1600 X but notice that it is actually running slower than 3.5 of the 1700 X but it's still amazing a hundred and eight frames per second 99% of the time is still amazing so yes I can legitimately say that a risin 5 1600 X is better but unless you're really serious about it frankly you don't need six cores to play overwatch shadow of the Tomb Raider is an interesting one because it will play on mid-range machines but it will play much better on high-end machines this game will legit use a course it's straight up will and if you are concerned about the game's responsiveness and performance in the challenging portions where you're running jumping and you've got timing issues and you got to make those precise moves just at the right time to avoid having her fall off a cliff well you definitely don't want to be using a fork or machine I mean yes it will run and you can probably get used to it and you'll suffer through the the various lag spikes but when I show you the chart six cores is the new minimum for a game like this it will use more than eight threads it will use all eight cores and some of the SMT some of the hyper threading on the Rison 7 1700 X there's another reason to have a better CPU game load times and when I take this benchmark to sort of take the opportunity to point out that there's far more to a computer's performance and how many FPS it gives you there is level load time game load time game save time and I didn't cut any extra out or add anything in or change anything the level low transition your about fact there was two big huge spike on the 1300 X in the upper left-hand corner there you saw it just a second ago notice that the 1300 X hasn't loaded yet this level this section right here where has to load the whole town it's processing notice the numbers are changing notice the CPUs at a hundred percent it is really struggling to get all those put together the 1500 X whether it's hyper threading does a much much better job but that the same clock speed and it's absent but it's absent because the poor CPU is just like oh please don't make me do this this is the wrong game for me I wasn't designed for shadow of the Tomb Raider no you weren't and you shouldn't be made to run it no you don't need a 1700 X to play shadow of the Tomb Raider but if you are making a new purchase today how long do you want your CPU to last yeah finally it loaded I kid you not it took that long to load the third section of the benchmark and shadow of the Tomb Raider on a 1300 X it's absolutely savage the huge spike right there big texture pop-in and load in there if you're buying today and you want your CPU to last you three to five years do you want to buy something that just barely runs today look at the CPU usage on the 1600 X we're at 72 73 % there we're using all six cores we're using half of the SMT two CPUs fully loaded we're slammed in 100% on the 1500 X if you buy a six core chip today it will work look here the difference between the 1500 X and the 1600 X is not huge on the average but look at the 1% low 46 to 67 is huge that is a big big difference the jump from a 1600 X to a 1700 X is 67 to 72 big deal you say clean testbench there's nothing running on this machine it is a clean install of Windows clean drivers clean everything everything has been closed in the background that's not normal in the real world there'll be a bigger difference there and this game is already one year old it came out in 2018 not nineteen came out in 2018 you want to play games in 2021 and you're buying a new CPU today and you're gonna buy a 6-quart chip why this not that's not the direction of games if you're buying new by an eight-core chip it's the future if I sound very firm in my statement there it's partly because the playstation 5 and the Xbox don't even start with me Xbox series X oh my god that's a horrible name why did they just not call it the xbox scarlett is beyond me whatever the Xbox Series X Microsoft can't name a retail consumer product to save their life in any case those have 8 core 16 thread CPUs that's where the world's going and since consoles are optimized and PCs aren't unfortunately that's just the way of things then you certainly aren't gonna want to have less than an 8 core 16 thread chip take a look at the division 2 now this is a very well optimised game and on the 1500 X in the upper right hand corner it's running amazingly well we're using virtually all of the CPU but it does in fact run pretty well the 6 core chip runs it better we're using all 6 cores and we're using some of the hyper threading but take a look at the 1700 X we're above 50% we're using all the course we're using all the cores in multiple games that I've shown you today if you already have a 6 core chip you're fine keep it for another year I've been asked this multiple times by people will do I have to replace it if you own a 1600 or 1600 X if you own an i7 6800 K or an i7 5820k the old haswell-e or Broadwell ee six core chips great you know keep them for another year if it's doing the job for you you're fine but if you're making a new purchase today the price difference between a 2600 X and a 2700 X or a 3600 X and a 3700 X is not that large don't leap over dollars to pick up pennies if you're in the market for a new processor today I find it very difficult to find a reason to buy anything less than an eight core 16 thread CPU I'm not even gonna read the 1300 X numbers the thing performs terribly in terms of four core eight threads it does a respectable job and I would absolutely play the division two on arisin five 1500 X or similar four core eight thread chip if you have an i7 4770k or 4790k from five years ago sure you can keep using it for a bit longer it still does the job mostly for the most part it does not have much of a future in front of it but it will do the job if you want to wait for another year likewise as I said if you have a six core twelve thread chip and you're not ready to upgrade maybe you want to wait for Zen three coming soon great keep it you can get by with it for another year or so but if you are buying today yes it's all about the eighth course now interestingly enough when you look at this chart you'll notice that the rise in seven 1700 X benchmarked slower on the average and one percent low numbers than the 1600 X part of that's clock speed there's a two hundred megahertz difference between those two and I appreciate that when are we test these I will certainly make sure that doesn't happen again I really shouldn't have done that here in my apologies but again it comes down to what are you doing today versus what do you want to do in the future for existing machines versus new purchases multitasking an actual usable Windows computer with stuff running on it I fully realize I'm beating the drums very hard on eight core 16 threads this comes from decades in the computer business this comes from years of benchmarking and testing and this comes from the fact that I have all of them and I testing them and using them in a comparative way if you ever listen to my advice on anything if you're going out to buy something now at the end of 2019 it should have eight cores in it on the flip side steep doesn't remotely care so there are certainly exceptions to the rule my statement is not an absolute one it's just a if you want a future-proof yourself and have the option of playing new games and multitasking it's eight cores but not in this case on the flipside total war three kingdoms clearly wants the six core chip versus the four core chip and it does use an eight core chip this is the game's built-in benchmark I'm not showing it to you because frankly it doesn't tell you anything you haven't already seen in this video if you build large armies and you play games like this then more CPU power same thing is true with civilization in any sort of game like that where you just have a million things going on in a million units to manage more CPU power is better than less thanks to everybody for watching all of those benchmarks if you watch the whole thing without fast-forwarding to gold stars for you it's greatly appreciated in short you do not need eight core CPUs to play any games today in 2019 or 2020 and perhaps even 2021 beyond that that will not hold forever however because the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett are coming in late 2020 about a year from when this is being recorded and those are going to have basically the equivalent of a slightly down clocked rise in 730 700 x8 core 16 threads n2 at about 3 to 3 point 2 gigahertz with Navi graphics a down clock version of the rx 5700 that you saw in today's video games will start to be developed with that kind of hardware in mind and since pcs are not as optimized as consoles because the hardware configurations vary so much and Windows is running underneath you will need more not less hardware to play at the same sort of detail settings and configurations that you're going to see on the upcoming next-generation consoles if you want to buy a CPU today and you really only care about two or three years of future gaming 6 cores 12 threads are absolutely fine there's nothing wrong with a six core 12 for its CPU today but don't expect five years out of it that you have a real problem trying to make that last five years my crystal balls in the shop who knows whether or not that's going to turn out to be a hundred percent true but I will be shocked downright shocked if there are legitimately not games in the next five years that actually require eight cores to be what at least I would consider to be smooth and playable however having said all of that do you want to live stream your games do you want to be able to stream to twitch or a mixer or YouTube generally I recommend that you have two more cores than your game actually needs because your OBS or xsplit window program needs something maybe you've got a voice chat teamspeak 3 or discord or something else running you've got some overhead involved in actually sending that data online you've got your web browser open with your dashboard and chat open all of that takes something extra in that case I think an 8 core CPU today is ideal for most people if most games run really well on a 6 core 12 red processor 8 core 16 threads gives you plenty of room for live streaming overhead without it dramatically affecting your performance depends upon what you play if you livestream the sims 4 then well frankly you don't need an 8 core CPU but if you want a live stream Ghost Recon breakpoint oh you better believe you need an 8 core CPU for that that would be brutal on anything less doable but choppy and not as smooth as you might like to see the same is true of course for content creation if you're doing anything like that even if you're just recording locally it adds something isn't that as much as live streaming does but it adds something and it's something to think about when you make your purchases - whether you want to have the option to livestream future games at the end of 2019 when I'm recording this the deal full-stop is arisin 720 700 X currently available on both Amazon and Newegg brand-new for 170 dollars 8 cores 16 threads 4.2 gigahertz in gaming 4.0 gigahertz when you're doing heavy content creation tasks includes a wraith prism RGB cooler in the box that is absolutely good enough to cool the cpu you can install it on a $100 B 450 MSI tomahawk or similar motherboard you don't have to spend a ton of money on a motherboard that is absolutely full stop the value for the money both for performance today gaming up to about a hundred frames per second in most cases with an appropriate video card at any resolution it'll do 100 frames per second without a problem future gaming due to the 8 cores the ability to livestream multitask have multiple windows open the price savings to go to a rise in 5 1600 are no longer worth that the prices have come down and compressed in my opinion spend the extra $50 between a rise in 5 2600 and a rise in 7 2700 X that $50 may very well push out your next CPU purchase one or two years letting you just enjoy your computer and have amazing performance in the meantime plus more clock speed today I like this video if you liked it share it with your friends if you love it remember to subscribe to my channel it that big huge red button directly below questions comments thoughts feedback suggestions you know where the comment section is links in the video description the first generation chips of course are all sold out at this point new but I will link to them on eBay you can find some amazing values if you really on a budget a rise in 7 1700 X can be found for about a hundred ish dollars on eBay at the moment and that's just crazy value for the money about 700 megahertz lower than a 2700 X but less expensive and if you're looking for an absolute deal then there you go also link to the 2700 X which is currently the best deal going at the moment as well as a few other things that I've talked about you could also support the channel using patreon and floatplane if you want early access to the benchmark charts in fact as I'm recording this those have already been posted over to patreon and the filming scripts that I use when I'm recording these videos patrons get to see those early you can also see these videos early on floatplane using the link in the video description below go check that out thanks so much for watching I will see all of you next time [Music]

Channel: Tech Deals

Views: 181,712

Rating: 4.8600245 out of 5

Keywords: 1300X, 1500X, 1600X, 1700X, Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, ryzen 3 vs ryzen 5, ryzen 3 vs ryzen 5 vs ryzen 7, ryzen 5 vs ryzen 7, ryzen 5 vs ryzen 7 vs ryzen 9, AMD Ryzen, Ryzen, 1300X vs 1500X, 1500X vs 1600X, 1600X vs 1700X, 4 cores vs 6 cores gaming, 4 cores vs 6 cores vs 8 cores, 4 cores vs 6 cores vs 8 cores gaming, Tech Deals, How Many Cores?, how many cores is enough for gaming, how many cores for gaming, how many cores for gaming 2019, how many cores for streaming

Id: ESi2IGboM_c

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/franky9876]

Can't remember how many times I've had to argue with people recommending the 9400F with only 6C/6T as opposed to 6C/12T Ryzen. Benchmark systems with clean windows installations and absolutely no background tasks is not indicative of what gaming performance on regular people's PCs. Any windows/app background process waking up to check for an update or do something less meaningful will probably cause the 1% drop.

[u/FanFlow]

Why in 2020 use 1st gen ryzens who noone is buying now.