- It's a fact of life that, wherever you go,
someone is always trying to sell you something.
Whether it's a brand hyping up
their latest 1.21 gigahertz CPU,
or a so-called influencer rubbing your face
in a brand new gaming setup
that you would have to save for years to afford,
for the third time this week.
But I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.
Come on, come over here.
You don't have to buy anything.
In fact, I bet the old crappy quad-core PC
that you already have is good enough
for anything you'd need it to do.
And if it's not, you could get one of those for much cheaper
than the fancy eight or 16 core CPUs
that all the big players want you to buy.
Let me show you,
after I show you today's sponsor, GlassWire.
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And yes, I appreciate the irony.
(upbeat music)
There have been many popular four core
CPUs over the... (metal thudding)
(crew laughing)
There have been many popular four-core CPUs
over the last 10 years, and we can't test all of them,
but we do have a handful,
dating from today all the way back to early 2013.
We've used an RTX 2080 Founders Edition
for all of our tests,
and we ran our gaming tests at 1080P,
so more of the burden will be on the CPU
rather than the GPU.
I don't wanna waste your time,
so let's jump right into the results where, whoo-whee!
Wow, look at that.
I mean, it sure is easy to show you
what a piece of crap your old 4770k is, isn't it?
The 3300X, which represents a modern quad-core CPU,
manages to beat it handily,
and stepping up to six or eight cores,
especially with the 5800X,
which features AMD's latest Zen-3 architecture,
is gonna deliver
a completely different computing experience.
that is, as long as you actually use
any of these applications.
The truth of the matter is that the benchmarks
that we and other members of the tech press use
to compare processors are not chosen
for how representative they are
of the typical user's daily workload.
Rather, they're often chosen because they allow us
to demonstrate how their performance differs
for heavy users, or in future workloads
that might not be mainstream yet,
but we expect them to be at some point down the road.
Like, there's a pretty good chance that you personally
have never fired up V-Ray or Cinema 4D.
There's a good chance you don't edit or encode videos.
So, if we flashed these charts in front of you,
you could easily end up spending a lot of money
for something that you might never need.
Even file decompression,
which this is something that we all do often
when we unpack a download from the internet
and is a poster child for the benefits of multi-core CPU's,
well, it's a relatively light workload these days,
and most decompression tasks will complete in seconds
on any of the CPU's on this chart.
So, does it really matter the two or three times a week
that it comes up, if it's 25 seconds or 45 seconds?
It's time for the other side of this coin.
While our Cinebench R23 single thread, web browsing,
"Grand Theft Auto V", and "CS:GO" results demonstrate
that there are certainly benefits to modern processors,
the addition of more cores isn't the biggest one.
And check this out.
If we covered the legend
on these "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" results,
you'd be hard pressed to guess which CPU's
have four, six, or eight cores.
Go ahead and try.
But hold on a second, Linus,
everyone knows that FPS and action games
are still dependent on just a handful of threads.
You need to test strategy games
that can use a multi-core CPU to calculate
all the possible AI moves or whatever.
And yeah, someday that will probably be a valid point,
but it is not this day.
And we did a quick "Civilization VI" run
on our Zen-2 CPUs to demonstrate that point.
Now, with the latest gen consoles from the big players
featuring eight core, 16 thread CPUs now,
we are going to see developers really push
to take advantage of everything
they can squeeze out of them,
but if history is anything to go on,
it'll be a while before we see a game
that was really built from the ground up
for this generation of hardware,
and it'll be years before we see these many-core designs
used to their fullest potential,
which doesn't mean our video is over, not even close.
I haven't even mentioned LTTstore.com,
with its great designs and high quality shirts yet.
The thing is game consoles do pretty much one thing:
They game, but your PC could be doing any number of things,
capturing video from your webcam,
removing ambient noise from your microphone feed,
encoding a stream to share with your friends or viewers.
What happens to our quad-core performance
when we throw common background tasks into the mix?
So, let's fire up Premiere.
We're not working on it right now, it's just sitting there.
We're gonna need Discord, little bit of OBS,
stream that gameplay, right?
And love me some background YouTube music playlist action.
All right, let's do this again.
Despite the fact that we had
all of this extra software open in the background,
none of our CPUs performed in a way
that I would describe as being unplayable.
Our older four-core chips did struggle
significantly more in "CS:GO"
with all of these programs running,
with the 4770k actually losing
nearly half of its performance,
but that still left it at over 120 frames per second,
and that would more than good enough for most people,
unless they're especially competitive, in which case,
guys, turn off your background tasks, all right?
And moving to our more modern quad-core 3300X,
it lost only a marginally higher percentage
of its performance when compared to the eight-core 5800X.
In "GTA V", the performance hit was even more negligible.
What this tells us then is that,
sure, if you have more overhead overall,
there will be less to worry about when you open extra apps
if you have a many-core CPU,
but as long as you're not gonna be running
30 pieces of software while you're running your game
and expecting to get the maximum FPS,
you're still gonna get a completely playable experience.
But there are other advantages
to overbuilding a gaming rig,
particularly with modern AMD processors.
If you allocate four of your cores
exclusively to your game,
and this is something you can do manually,
or there are tools to help you do it, theoretically,
it could help smooth out the experience,
both by removing extra clutter from background tasks
on those cores, and by having all of the game tasks running
on the same physical group of cores for faster cache access,
at least in theory.
In practice, we didn't observe nearly as much difference
as we expected, but some users on Reddit
have reported measurable performance improvements,
particularly in "CS:GO" with first-gen Ryzen chips,
so your mileage may vary.
The truth is, thought, that if you don't have a fortune
to spend on a gaming PC, that's okay.
A chip from 2013 may come with unpatched security flaws
that have scary names like Spectre and Meltdown,
and Microsoft warns that older platforms experience
52% more kernel mode crashes in Windows 11,
but real talk, Spectre and Meltdown are only of concern
to enterprise and business customers, for the most part.
And 52% more than 0.2% is 0.3%.
That sounds like a risk worth taking,
when a 4770K can be had for about a hundred bucks on eBay.
There is still the question of whether it's wise
to buy into aging technology like DDR3
when older Ryzen 3000 chips can be had for not much more,
but that one is just gonna come down
to your individual budget, which we have no way of knowing.
What we do know is that four cores is still enough,
unless you actually need extra multi-core grunt
for content creation or for non-gaming workloads.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out our Ryzen 5000 review,
which has a bit more detail about how tasks
pinned to certain CPU cores can have a performance benefit.