I'm a little unsure of what the better CPU+GPU combo will be for 1080p gaming: an R9 290 and a Xeon E3-1231v3 or a GTX 970 and an i5 4590. I couldn't really decide if this thread makes more sense in the CPU or GPU forum, but I'll go with the CPU forum. I already have an H81 LGA 1150 board (Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2V) with a BIOS recent enough to run any Haswell Refresh chip (currently running a G3258). My case is an NZXT Source 220 with two 120mm intakes on the front and a side 120mm intake, so I think I'm good on cooling. My power supply is an Antec Neo Eco 620C which claims to run a continuous 576W on the +12V rail, so I should be able to power an R9 290 no problem. If I buy R9 290, it has to be either the Sapphire Tri-X R9 290 or the PowerCooler PCS+ R9 290, since these seem to be the two best overall R9 290's on the market (since the Vapor-X seems to have disappeared). I will not buy a Z97 board so I'm not likely to overclock my CPU, though my board does allow overclocking up to a 1.2V vcore limit. But with the i5-4690k going back to $240 I'm not really interested in it. I'm also not interested in waiting for the GTX 960, since it keeps sounding like a steaming pile of crap. I'm not going to wait two months for AMD's R9 300 release either, since I'm running on integrated graphics right now.
So the main question guiding my decision is just how much the Xeon's hyperthreading is worth to me. I know most for games on the market a quad-core i5 from Sandy Bridge or later pretty much runs anything without bottlenecking when your target is 60FPS. The locked i5 CPU bottleneck really only seems to reveal itself most of the time when aiming for 120/144Hz refresh in an SLI/Crossfire system, and I have no desire to do SLI/CF nor buy a 120/140Hz monitor (I'm not an online FPS gamer). And even then it doesn't seem to be a huge bottleneck vs running a 4690k/4790k at 4.5 GHz. But there are a couple of games already out there where the Xeon/i7 hyperthreading seems to matter: for instance, locked 60FPS on Crysis 3 seems achievable only on High, and not Very High, system spec with an i5, whereas the hyperthreading allows just enough headroom to hit that target on Very High (I'm guessing this is because of the physics done on the CPU?). Dragon Age Inquisition seems to favor 4C/8T vs 4C/4T also. Then again, tons of games like Far Cry 4 prefer the i5 and the HT on an i7 seems to actually introduce a bit of a penalty.
I keep going back and forth between i5 and Xeon. On one hand the i5 gives me the budget for a slightly better video card. On the other hand, the Xeon seems more future proof. I say it seems more future proof because everyone knows rushed PC ports are the rule, and not the exception when it comes to gaming. And the target machines for AAA developers (X1 and PS4) have 8 cores, 6 of which are used for gaming. Being that they have weak per core performance, the i5 does an incredible job bludgeoning its way through lousy ports thanks to the night and day difference in per core performance in it vs the weak Jaguar APUs.
Of course future proofing a system is often a costly way to not get a whole lot more performance with no guarantees. Being the increased utilization of the CPU thanks to HT only gives the equivalent of about 30% of an extra core per HT core in highly predictable workloads like serving webpages, I'm thinking if I ever truly need to run 6-8 threads of roughly even workload, the Xeon will be obsolete anyways. By then Intel will have to be selling hexacore or octacore i5's at $200 to combat AMD's octacores.
I know the complexity of writing highly threaded code is so much more than writing single threaded due to needing to have data synchronized between the threads. And it just now seems that games are finally being written for quad cores. I wonder what kind of time delay there will be before writing a game for an octacore becomes economical. I mean you can't just walk in and tell your developers to double the parallalization of their code and expect it to happen right away. So, I'm leaning towards the i5-4590 being the CPU to get for hopefully three years of really strong gaming performance. And with that $50 savings between CPUs by taking the i5 over the Xeon, I can go with the safer choice of an EVGA GTX 970 vs the more economical but more dangerous choice of the R9 290, as the 290s seem to get RMA'ed a lot. Maybe the last thing that points me in the i5+970 direction is the lower driver overhead for Nvidia vs AMD, which doesn't matter now at with an i5 or better (but does with an i3 or worse), since if my i5 is all of a sudden on par with a 2017 i3 in two years, if trends hold in drivers I'm better with Nvidia when a quad core could become a bottleneck.
Thoughts on my choice? This is strictly about gaming performance. Am I dead wrong somewhere in my reasoning, so that the Xeon+290 makes more sense? Am I forgetting something major? The cost of Haswell-E or Ivy Bridge-E for hexacore i7's is way beyond what I'm willing to spend, and I'm not interested at all in AMD CPUs right now (though hopefully they'll make themselves relevant again in 2016).
So the main question guiding my decision is just how much the Xeon's hyperthreading is worth to me. I know most for games on the market a quad-core i5 from Sandy Bridge or later pretty much runs anything without bottlenecking when your target is 60FPS. The locked i5 CPU bottleneck really only seems to reveal itself most of the time when aiming for 120/144Hz refresh in an SLI/Crossfire system, and I have no desire to do SLI/CF nor buy a 120/140Hz monitor (I'm not an online FPS gamer). And even then it doesn't seem to be a huge bottleneck vs running a 4690k/4790k at 4.5 GHz. But there are a couple of games already out there where the Xeon/i7 hyperthreading seems to matter: for instance, locked 60FPS on Crysis 3 seems achievable only on High, and not Very High, system spec with an i5, whereas the hyperthreading allows just enough headroom to hit that target on Very High (I'm guessing this is because of the physics done on the CPU?). Dragon Age Inquisition seems to favor 4C/8T vs 4C/4T also. Then again, tons of games like Far Cry 4 prefer the i5 and the HT on an i7 seems to actually introduce a bit of a penalty.
I keep going back and forth between i5 and Xeon. On one hand the i5 gives me the budget for a slightly better video card. On the other hand, the Xeon seems more future proof. I say it seems more future proof because everyone knows rushed PC ports are the rule, and not the exception when it comes to gaming. And the target machines for AAA developers (X1 and PS4) have 8 cores, 6 of which are used for gaming. Being that they have weak per core performance, the i5 does an incredible job bludgeoning its way through lousy ports thanks to the night and day difference in per core performance in it vs the weak Jaguar APUs.
Of course future proofing a system is often a costly way to not get a whole lot more performance with no guarantees. Being the increased utilization of the CPU thanks to HT only gives the equivalent of about 30% of an extra core per HT core in highly predictable workloads like serving webpages, I'm thinking if I ever truly need to run 6-8 threads of roughly even workload, the Xeon will be obsolete anyways. By then Intel will have to be selling hexacore or octacore i5's at $200 to combat AMD's octacores.
I know the complexity of writing highly threaded code is so much more than writing single threaded due to needing to have data synchronized between the threads. And it just now seems that games are finally being written for quad cores. I wonder what kind of time delay there will be before writing a game for an octacore becomes economical. I mean you can't just walk in and tell your developers to double the parallalization of their code and expect it to happen right away. So, I'm leaning towards the i5-4590 being the CPU to get for hopefully three years of really strong gaming performance. And with that $50 savings between CPUs by taking the i5 over the Xeon, I can go with the safer choice of an EVGA GTX 970 vs the more economical but more dangerous choice of the R9 290, as the 290s seem to get RMA'ed a lot. Maybe the last thing that points me in the i5+970 direction is the lower driver overhead for Nvidia vs AMD, which doesn't matter now at with an i5 or better (but does with an i3 or worse), since if my i5 is all of a sudden on par with a 2017 i3 in two years, if trends hold in drivers I'm better with Nvidia when a quad core could become a bottleneck.
Thoughts on my choice? This is strictly about gaming performance. Am I dead wrong somewhere in my reasoning, so that the Xeon+290 makes more sense? Am I forgetting something major? The cost of Haswell-E or Ivy Bridge-E for hexacore i7's is way beyond what I'm willing to spend, and I'm not interested at all in AMD CPUs right now (though hopefully they'll make themselves relevant again in 2016).
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