What to know about CPU

CPU

There are currently two consumer grade brands available consisting of Intel and AMD. The power of the CPU that you purchase depends mainly upon the tasks you are going to undertake. For example you would struggle to run a very demanding 3D modelling program on a small dual core CPU.
Here are a few common myths about CPU’s:

• “Intel is better than AMD and AMD sucks” – this is completely misled. Both companies produce a variety of very good CPU’s. Neither is a clear winner over the other, especially in consumer grade equipment; unless you start going into the top end of Intel’s workstation CPU’s also known as ‘Intel Extreme’ (3960X, 3970X)
• Faster CPU’s give better gaming performance – this, to a certain extent, is wrong. Yes, a dual core 1.6 GHz CPU will struggle to play the latest games smoothly however buying a higher clocked CPU or one with more cores won’t always give you better gaming performance. This is most notable with the Intel 3570K vs. the 3930K. The 3570K is a quad core CPU while the 3930K is a hex core CPU with 12 threads– yet both of them perform almost identically when gaming – this is due to the fact that currently, games are not designed for a high number of cores and threads.

Sockets
Not all CPU’s are created equally. Each series of CPU from both Intel and AMD use different sockets – these are similar, to say, the connector on your smartphone – vary from platform to platform. Referred to as “sockets”, this is the ‘junction’ between motherboard and CPU. Intel currently offers, for consumers, the 1150 and 2011 sockets which are differentiated by the varying number of pins the socket uses. You may still be able to come across socket 1155 3^rd generation Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPU’s at some retailers. AMD is a little different with their naming strategy, currently offering AM3+ and FM2 however there are many more. More information on CPU sockets can be found here. wiki/CPU_socket
 
Selecting the CPU
For gaming currently we are seeing the growth in quad core supported games. The two most popular CPU’s at the moment for gaming PC’s are the Intel 4670K and AMD 8350. The Intel is a quad core whereas the AMD is an ‘8 core’ CPU; however, it isn’t a true 8 core as AMD’s architecture is slightly different to Intel’s, and it doesn’t run 8 separate cores as the name suggests.

Of course, if you select a lower grade CPU, this doesn’t mean you won’t be able to game; however, depending on the power of it, you may be limited by cores and clock speed.

Currently, you most certainly do not need top end CPU’s such as those using socket 2011. It cannot be stressed enough that a hex core processor such as the 3930K or 3970X won’t give you any noticeable increase in real time gaming performance.

Haswell Vs Ivy Bridge – as with each new generation of a product, performance increases and hopefully less power is required. This holds very much true of Haswell in the power sense. The performance increase on average is about 5-10% however there is a large decrease in the power consumption especially at idle. Haswell offers new power states that give a lower power draw at idle. However to supply these low loads, one needs to ensure that ones power supply is compatible. Most manufacturers have released a compatibility chart. If however you’re unsure then you can disable the C6 and C7 power states in BIOS. Haswell also brings with it better onboard graphics performance which can decrease transcoding times. These two factors combined can also be very good for laptops or other mobile products.