Simple Questions Simple Answers - Page 553

Most programs use very minimal amounts of CPU. I'll quote some numbers from what i have now with a 4770k @4.5ghz

these are deflated a little, because it's measured as if it's an 8 core CPU when it's actually 4 core+HT. In worst case scenario, the load might be considered twice as high (a 50% load on one core would read as 12.5% load on an i5 but 6.25% load on an i7, though their capabilities are not that different)

Firefox with 9 tabs open: 0.4% CPU load
VLC playing a .wav - 0.28% CPU
Steam idling - 0.07% CPU
Skype open - 0.02% CPU

everything on my system totalled together aside from KSP which is in the middle of gameplay literally adds up to under 1% CPU load. 2% if you assume that hyperthreading adds 0 performance. It's just not any type of challenge for a modern or even an old CPU.

somebody looking at the resource monitor or task manager might not get a clear picture if they have power saving settings enabled - the CPU might drop to 800mhz and show 10% load, but that's equivelant to only 2% load if it feels the need to run at higher clocks and rises to 4000mhz.



The only thing in your list that i know to use any significant amount of CPU is sc2, which will max one core and put minor to moderate load on a second. iTunes should use almost 0 CPU unless it's badly coded (if so, maybe you could use something else for playing audio) and i'm not sure what OneNote or Pushbullet do, but it needs to be actual CPU heavy work to make a difference~

The added load from everyday desktop programs is just extremely minor, you usually need a program that has significant CPU load to even consider it. One of the more common ones would be livestreaming gameplay, live encoding while running the game itself. Hyperthreading might not raise the game framerate while you're streaming for various complicated reasons, but it will let you raise the resolution/FPS of the stream. The vast, vast majority of streams stick to lowish bitrates though, like 2-4mbit/s - an i5 4690k is already as fast as an i7 2600k or an fx 8320-9590 for encoding and is not really particularly challenged by encoding at those framerates and resolutions w/ x264 at quality-efficient settings.

The only time i'd recommend stepping to i7 for gaming would be when playing games that are CPU heavy and hit many cores at the same time, while also wanting to stream with CPU encoding. That's a bit of a niche, considering there are not many of those games and GPU encoding is quite good for them as a rule (NVENC will give you more ingame FPS, no CPU load, free ability to encode at whatever FPS and resolution you could want to stream at - you just have to pay by losing quality at the same bitrate)

The high end desktop platform (5820k) is also surprisingly competitively priced. If highly multithreaded performance is your thing, performance per dollar can actually be BETTER with the 6 core, 12 thread CPU because of how badly the 4 core i7's are priced.

RAM usage DOES massively increase as you open more programs. Browsers often hit a gigabyte or two for me, though i've seen a few friends with like 10GB dedicated to web browsers. Most of my programs use very little RAM but you can take a look at what you run, how much RAM it likes to use and if you like to open a lot of stuff, you can often benefit from 16GB or even 32GB of RAM. I'm thinking of going past 8 this upgrade because i'm more often running a heavy browser session, a few programs like that and it's becoming much more common for a game to eat 3-6GB of RAM alone.

I was forced to start running new skype recently, it regularly got to huge inflated amounts of memory usages and even crashed with out of memory errors, but since i blocked the adverts it doesn't do that any more and sticks at ~150MB.


My PC responsiveness has very noticably improved going from an older SSD with ~350MB/s read, ~100MB/s write and ~50k IOPS (going from memory) to this one with ~550MB/s, ~530MB/s and ~98k IOPS, so you can also consider that the price gap between a quad core i5 and quad core i7 will buy you something like 350GB of good SSD.