How much would going from a i5 3570 to i7 3770 help?

[GrantMeThePower]

I built my gaming rig a couple of years ago. I think it is still pretty good, but I recently upgraded my GPU from a 680 to a 970.

How much improvement would I see by replacing the i5 i have with the i7? I think thats about as maxed out as I can go without replacing the motherboard.




Moved from PC Gaming

Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent

 

[GrantMeThePower]

I posted this in PC gaming because that is all that the PC does, but if it belongs in CPUs thats fine.

Just wanted to add the note that the "helps" is only referring to gaming.

Thanks!

 

[ShintaiDK]

Gaming wise you basicly see nothing. A few games may show some benefit, but most will be small or non existant.

 

[Rakehellion]

Not very much.

Are you CPU limited in games? Are your framerates bad?

How much are you overclocking?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Take it from my experience over the last four months or so.

The best excuse you can give yourself for stepping up to a chip that mostly differs because it has hyper-threading, is that you are "curious," a "hardware addict" and you're replacing systems of other fam-damn-ily members.

It's not really worth the money. I could justify my purchase of an i5-3570K, Z77 board and 16GB of RAM mostly because I need to upgrade an LGA_775 system and the bundle cost me $300 when the CPU still retails for $200 and the RAM is currently sold for ~$190.

But I damaged the motherboard -- breaking a socket-pin. I bought a replacement for $85.

I might just have spent the money on a new Haswell Devils Canyon, or saved it until later in the year to build a Haswell-E.

 

[hawtdawg]

I have a 3770K, and I actually turn HT off half the time as there are quite a few games that seem to stutter with it enabled. I can think of no situation gaming-wise, where there was a noticeable performance increase with it on.

What kind of OC do you have?

 

[BSim500]

I built my gaming rig a couple of years ago. I think it is still pretty good, but I recently upgraded my GPU from a 680 to a 970.

How much improvement would I see by replacing the i5 i have with the i7? I think thats about as maxed out as I can go without replacing the motherboard.

For gaming virtually none. Even with a non-K "vanilla" i5-3570, with a Z77 board you can OC yours via the "+4-bins limited OC" feature Sandy & Ivy Bridge's have above max Turbo. So 3.4GHz stock -> 3.6-3.8GHz Turbo turns into 4.0-4.2GHz Turbo. With Multicore Enhancement, you can run at 4.2GHz under all loads. Like mine. If you're feeling adventurous, a +2.5% BCLK will bump that to 4.3GHz. Even at 3.8-4.0Ghz though, I still cannot find any game that's "slow" when matched with a decent dGPU. And like hawtdawg said - due to the unending "genius" of games programmers, there are badly coded games which appear to attempt to override Windows scheduler and force threads onto HT cores before using all the real ones resulting in i7's running slower than i5's. Thief reboot is one example.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have a 3770K, and I actually turn HT off half the time as there are quite a few games that seem to stutter with it enabled. I can think of no situation gaming-wise, where there was a noticeable performance increase with it on.

What kind of OC do you have?

Certainly. Interesting.

I discovered a problem with that when I tried to reconfigure my BIOS to disable HT on my first Sandy (sig-rig). It does HTPC duty as a low-level background process, so I can have MC-Live-TV feeding my AVR/HDTV system while gaming on my desktop HD monitor. Turns out that turning off the HT processor feature forces the HDCP to forbid HTPC "protected content." I'd have to reconfigure Media Center every time I wanted to make the switch!

I don't have any stuttering or other problems with HT enabled, though.

 

[2is]

As others have stated, there will be little to no difference. That said, I've never had stuttering issues with HT on with my 2600k or 3770k in any of my games and I have well over 100 in Steam alone.

 

[samboy]

Don't forget that the 3770k with Hyper threading off in the BIOS is still better than the 3570k since it also has an extra 2MB of processor Cache.

Of course this will make absolutely no difference if the games working set fits in the 3570k 6MB cache and if the game were well designed then they shouldn't be targeting the 8MB cache of the 3770k anyway (since it is high end).

Point being is that its not just hyper-threading; but agree that it's probably not worth the upgrade cost.
(If something actually needs 8MB cache working set then it will run noticeably faster on the 3770k).

 

[hawtdawg]

Certainly. Interesting.

I discovered a problem with that when I tried to reconfigure my BIOS to disable HT on my first Sandy (sig-rig). It does HTPC duty as a low-level background process, so I can have MC-Live-TV feeding my AVR/HDTV system while gaming on my desktop HD monitor. Turns out that turning off the HT processor feature forces the HDCP to forbid HTPC "protected content." I'd have to reconfigure Media Center every time I wanted to make the switch!

I don't have any stuttering or other problems with HT enabled, though.

The stuttering isn't too common really, I think its more that I've recently played 2 games that do seem to have trouble with it (Far Cry 4 and Wolfenstein World Order) that made me bring it up.

That's pretty weird about HDCP not working with HT off, surely that was just some sort of bug. I assume you were using the iGPU?

 

[GrantMeThePower]

I have no overclock running. My interest was entirely for the HT. The reason I had to ask was because all of the new games coming out recommend an i7 processor, and I took that to mean that games are beginning to make use of the additional threads and/or cache.

My framerates and graphics are pretty good right now, but it is my anticipation of the witcher 3 that made me ask the question.

Thank you all very much for your insight!!

 

[BSim500]

I have no overclock running. My interest was entirely for the HT. The reason I had to ask was because all of the new games coming out recommend an i7 processor, and I took that to mean that games are beginning to make use of the additional threads and/or cache.

Very few games will load 8 threads enough to show an i5 vs i7 difference and even then it's often under 10%. Most of those "this game needs an i7" 'requirements' you see typically refer to several generations old i7's like the older i7-920's (which are barely on par with an an i5-2300 or even an i3-4370 in many games). An i5-3570 is much faster than the very old i7's games are "needing" even at stock. As for the Witcher 3, if you're still at 3.4GHz stock, then you've got a good 24% OC headroom (your CPU can run at max 4.2GHz with the right motherboard) if you need it, so I really wouldn't worry.

 

[GrantMeThePower]

Very few games will load 8 threads enough to show an i5 vs i7 difference and even then it's often under 10%. Most of those "this game needs an i7" 'requirements' you see typically refer to several generations old i7's like the older i7-920's (which are barely on par with an an i5-2300 or even an i3-4370 in many games). An i5-3570 is much faster than the very old i7's games are "needing" even at stock. As for the Witcher 3, if you're still at 3.4GHz stock, then you've got a good 24% OC headroom (your CPU can run at max 4.2GHz with the right motherboard) if you need it, so I really wouldn't worry.

Ok, awesome. I have the 3570K, too, which, as i understand it, is easier to OC.

I can just open up the taskmanager to see if my CPU is maxed or not, right?

 

[BSim500]

Ok, awesome. I have the 3570K, too, which, as i understand it, is easier to OC. I can just open up the taskmanager to see if my CPU is maxed or not, right?

Yes, the K chips are unlocked meaning you're not limited to 4.2GHz. And yes, task manager or any other CPU usage logging utility will show if you're maxed out.

 

[escrow4]

Very few games will load 8 threads enough to show an i5 vs i7 difference and even then it's often under 10%. Most of those "this game needs an i7" 'requirements' you see typically refer to several generations old i7's like the older i7-920's (which are barely on par with an an i5-2300 or even an i3-4370 in many games). An i5-3570 is much faster than the very old i7's games are "needing" even at stock. As for the Witcher 3, if you're still at 3.4GHz stock, then you've got a good 24% OC headroom (your CPU can run at max 4.2GHz with the right motherboard) if you need it, so I really wouldn't worry.

Unity can and does, Watch Dogs too, Inquisition and FC4 to a lesser extent. i5 now is the minimum, I'd want more in the tank.

 

[2is]

Very few games will load 8 threads enough to show an i5 vs i7 difference and even then it's often under 10%. Most of those "this game needs an i7" 'requirements' you see typically refer to several generations old i7's like the older i7-920's (which are barely on par with an an i5-2300 or even an i3-4370 in many games). An i5-3570 is much faster than the very old i7's games are "needing" even at stock. As for the Witcher 3, if you're still at 3.4GHz stock, then you've got a good 24% OC headroom (your CPU can run at max 4.2GHz with the right motherboard) if you need it, so I really wouldn't worry.

Also, while an i7 with HT may be able to do 8 threads, it won't always. HT from my understanding is simply a clever way of running a 2nd thread on unused portions of a core, when applicable. If a thread needs resources that are already being used up on a particular core, HT is useless and that thread would have to run on another physical core or wait its turn if there isn't one available.

 

[hawtdawg]

I have no overclock running. My interest was entirely for the HT. The reason I had to ask was because all of the new games coming out recommend an i7 processor, and I took that to mean that games are beginning to make use of the additional threads and/or cache.

My framerates and graphics are pretty good right now, but it is my anticipation of the witcher 3 that made me ask the question.

Thank you all very much for your insight!!

I mild OC on your CPU will make it faster than any non-E i7 processor in multithreaded programs

 

[hawtdawg]

Unity can and does, Watch Dogs too, Inquisition and FC4 to a lesser extent. i5 now is the minimum, I'd want more in the tank.

FC4 actually runs worse with HT on.

 

[exar333]

FC4 actually runs worse with HT on.

Yup, poorly coded game.

 

[2is]

FC4 actually runs worse with HT on.

Interesting trick I discovered just now with FC4. I had task manager open and looking at the CPU utilization I noticed that one thread was maxed out while the other 7 had significantly less utilization. I alt-tabbed out of the game, went to the details tab deselected CPU7 from the affinity menu for the farcry4 processes, went back in, then alt-tabbed back out, reselected it and thread utilization is much more uniform and the game ran smoother as a result.

The down side is that alt-tabbing out and in the game caused flickering textures, but allowing myself to get killed and respawn fixed that.