Guild Wars 2

Hello my fellow Tyrians! I seek your expertise. Recently I came into possession of a PC from a person who no longer wanted it, the machine has some components that are newer than the ones in mine so I figured I’d merge the two into a more powerful one and keep the rest of as spare parts. Now my question here is about the CPU, currently my computer has an i7 870 while the other computer comes with a I5 2500k, now looking at the price difference at the time of purchase I’m inclined to look at the i7 to be the better choice, however, the i5 is a few years newer so this tells me that is better instead. This is where you (my fellow DragonHunters?) come in! Lend me your knowledge! Thanks in advance!!

I7: http://m.newegg.com/Product?itemNumber=N82E16819115213
I5: http://m.newegg.com/Product?itemNumber=N82E16819115072

Between the i7-870 and the i5-2500, you’ll have a better performance with the 2500k in almost every sense, specially with GW2 since it is more dependent of individual core power.
Also, the 2500k offer a much higher possibility for overclock, making the performance gap even higher.

The 2500k is better for gaming, especially if you OC.

Thanks guys! This makes my choice very clear!

Except people often forget thE 64 bit OS overhead that the i7 takes care of for you….

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Except people often forget thE 64 bit OS overhead that the i7 takes care of for you….

Care to clarify?

As others have said, i5-2500K. Even ignoring the overclockability, it’s roughly 25% faster than the i7-870.

I often read that because the game is not heavily multithreaded, that multithreading is irrelevant. These writers are failing to account for the layers of code that run under the top level application – drivers, memory management, etc. which are multithreaded and benefit from the i7’s improved capabilities in this area (plus additional cache).

The game isn’t the only application utilizing the CPU.

Now, that said, the i5 is a perfectly passable option for playing Guild Wars 2, but after hearing a constant stream of complaints that the game is “CPU bound,” I have to shake my head when the same people recommend lower powered CPU’s to run the game.

My primary is an air cooled i7 6 core at 4.325Ghz, 16GB of CL10 DDR3 at 2.333 GHz, two EVGA 980GTX video cards (stock clock) and 2 Samsung EVO Pro 850 in a RAID 0 (1GB/sec sustained read rate). I run it at 4k resolution with fabulously fast load times. That said, I appreciate that this machine is ridiculously expensive for only gaming (for the average user). It’s also Haswell on an X79.. so I’ll need to upgrade it soon

My laptop is an i7-4710 @ 2.5GHz, 1.6GHz 8GB RAM and nVidia 970M with a single EVO pro 850, at 1080p resolution. It also runs the game fabulously.

My third machine is an i5 with a GTX 770 and PCI-X Raid0 256GB SSD, running 1080p. It runs well, too, but the laptop outperforms.

In terms of experience, I’ve been building systems for over 34 years (yes, it’s possible to be a gamer all of your life, your parents are wrong!)

Problem is players misunderstand when they’re told that single core performance is more important than the overall performance of the CPU with all cores fully active.

No thread can, regardless of the number of cores a CPU has, run any faster than it could on a single core. They see that and say “oh the game only uses one core”. No what is being described is the limiting factor. The game itself has 3 primary threads and a half a dozen more that get significant run time. All together there is enough work to keep more than two cores busy just running the game.

Now while HT can be beneficial to (warning getting technical) the scheduler by providing two unrelated threads of code allowing the core’s pipelines to be more fully utilized which increases the average Instruction per Cycle, at the end of the day it’s performance boost amounts to a variable and unpredictable overclock of a non-HT Intel core. The extra L3 cache (8 MB vs 6 MB) is because the CPU is now processing 8 threads Vs just 4 threads. However each core HT or not have identical L1 and L2 cache sizes which means when running two threads at the same time it’s more likely that the HT core will need to access the L3 cache more frequently. L3 cache is slower than L2 and that can negatively affects a HT core’s overall performance.

Now the question at hand is what’s better, an i7 with HT that has a lower clockspeed than an i5 of the next generation. The i7-870 simply can’t compete, even with HT to an i5-2500K. The boost from HT is no match to the increased clock speed and IPC of a Sandy Bridge over the older Nehalem.

Behellagh.1468:

Problem is players misunderstand when they’re told that single core performance is more important than the overall performance of the CPU with all cores fully active.

etc..

Thanks for posting this, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone put in a concerted effort to refute the single core fallacy with the correct technical information.

There is one other angle to approach with the choice of the two cores – which of them overclocks better (practically, since the OP has two on hand) … and something that we have all apparently ignored: the motherboard chipset.

I did a quick search to compare Sandy Bridge to Lynnfield and found this interesting chart.. note that the i7 is only a 760, and running 700MHz slower than the i5 2500. The performance lead goes back and forth between the two.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1614809

I know there are plenty of other factors involved.. but perhaps the best option, since you have all that hardware on hand, try one setup, then try the other and see which one gives you better performance.

Yeah, ridiculously difficult to achieve overclocks on a crossfire setup with games known to be more GPU than CPU dependent. And in no universe does an i5-760 at 4GHz beat an i5-2500K at 4.7GHz at anything CPU dependent.

I’ll stick with my i5-2500K recommendation.