Intel i7 5930k & Gaming

Even though the 5930k had 6 physical cores; when gaming (even with resource intensive games) does more than 1 core ever get used while gaming?
I know most games are single threaded but I wasn't sure if that translates to "you only use 1 core when playing those games"....

Most games these days are dual or greater. If games are single threaded it would makes sense it only uses one core at a time. It may switch cores depending on how.things are coded...

This question was actual a precursor to another thought I had; since I have 6 cores and 64gb of ram (and 3 gpu's) if I was to create a windows VM and load a game on it, then dedicate 1 gpu to that vm as well as the necessary ram and cores, could I then create 2nd vm to act as a game server (or even just rely on someone else's hosted server) and play multiplayer with a friend on my computer?

So recap:

- I play instance 1 of the game on my computer
- on a vm I created I have my friend play the game
- the vm had 1 dedicated gpu/ram/cpu cores
- select a second TV or monitor for the vm
- my host computer running the game is displayed on my 55" led TV
-either create my own game server or use online multiplayer
-plug in a 2nd Xbox 360 controller and point that sub port to the vm
-the other Xbox controller USB port is used by the host computer

We then play head to head against each other while the two tv's are side by side in the same room....

In theory this should be completely possible, but does anyone see any problems with this?

Note: I would also have the VM on its own hdd not shared with the one I am using for the host computer

It looks more like many games are single threaded but system is constantly using additional threads so with 1 core/thread even system is running really slow. Looking at most home computers I think that right now minimum for games will be 4 threads. Some games are using more but advantage isn't big. On the other hand 2 core CPUs are already slow in many new games ( not made previously for consoles ). It's like most important is to have 4 threads, next to push these theads to higher clock and later add more threads.

You can't run games on VM. Or maybe you could but there is no 3D driver which could support any game. There is only standard virtual graphics driver.

I think the key is getting your overclock on a 6 (including 8) core processors as high as possible. As these particular processors can be more of a challenge to overclock, given the power draw with heat output especially when overclocking on the higher limits. The higher limits (e.g. 4.5GHz) allow any given core to go fast as possible at single core tasks.

Point I am making is that if you have a 6 core with a low overclock, you will be limited by single core performance.

I have been looking at several new games lately and monitoring the load on each core/thread, on many of them they are usually maxing out one of the cores 100%, maybe another two cores 75%, then another few core can vary from 30-50%. Just going on my own observations it appears there is one main thread which hammer the hell out of one of the core, and the others are loaded up accordingly.

In my case was the reason why I dropped trying to cool an 8 core with higher air and move to higher end AIO to get those extra 500-700MHz to make the most of anything that uses a single core for any game and application. I really didn't want to fork out for 6 or 8 core and then be cut short by a 4 core processor.

We are already getting hardware which is stronger than 99% games can use. Most games are not scalling good with higher clocked CPUs and overclocking is also not really necessary ( looking at 4 core intels as amd still needs oc because of low single core performance ).
Most games are optimized to work on consoles and PC versions have better textures or 1-2 additional options. In general not much more. Now look how bad specification have these new consoles.
If you are playing in 1080p or lower display resolution ( like 95% gamers ) then nearly every game is working fine at high details on 2-3 year intel based PC.

This is kinda off topic but I just see many people on the forums buying $600+ graphics cards and i7 to play games on 1080p ... because others said it will be good.

Woomack said:

We are already getting hardware which is stronger than 99% games can use. Most games are not scalling good with higher clocked CPUs and overclocking is also not really necessary ( looking at 4 core intels as amd still needs oc because of low single core performance ).
Most games are optimized to work on consoles and PC versions have better textures or 1-2 additional options. In general not much more. Now look how bad specification have these new consoles.
If you are playing in 1080p or lower display resolution ( like 95% gamers ) then nearly every game is working fine at high details on 2-3 year intel based PC.

This is kinda off topic but I just see many people on the forums buying $600+ graphics cards and i7 to play games on 1080p ... because others said it will be good.

Click to expand...

LOL. I have an i7 and a GTX 980 for 1080P. I did buy the 980 intending wholeheartedly to go 1440P but Xmas got in the way and now I am broke.

980 should get you on ultra with mordor using 1080p, otherwise 4GB is not enough for in my case 1600p