{"id":19601,"date":"2010-07-15T14:02:41","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T13:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=19601"},"modified":"2010-08-05T12:47:54","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T11:47:54","slug":"intel-i5-750-performance-test-2-cores-vs-4-cores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/intel-i5-750-performance-test-2-cores-vs-4-cores\/","title":{"rendered":"Intel i5 750 Performance Test: 2 cores vs 4 cores"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The topic of how much CPU power you really need frequently surfaces in tech forums all over the Internet. In past articles I\u2019ve demonstrated that the CPU makes little to no difference to gaming performance providing you always use the highest playable settings. In these situations the GPU is far more likely to bottleneck the system than the CPU, because increasing image quality settings keeps the CPU load the same in most cases, while the GPU load increases.<\/p>\n

I demonstrated this by underclocking my E6850 to 2 GHz<\/a> and then comparing the effects to underclocking my GPU by the same amount (33%<\/span>). In most cases I witnessed a linear performance drop from the GPU with little to no performance drop from the CPU, indicating the GPU was the primary bottleneck. I then upgraded my E6850 to an i5 750<\/a> and again observed little to no performance changes in a large selection of games at the settings I play them at.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m going to do today is compare two cores versus four cores on a quad-core i5 750 running at stock speed (2.66 GHz<\/span>). Since we\u2019re trying to compare core count and nothing else, turbo boost will be disabled. Obviously this is required since the two core configuration is more likely to turbo than the four core configuration, and we don\u2019t want that since it introduces an unknown variable into our testing.<\/p>\n

As usual, the settings used will be the actual settings I play the games at, and in most cases the games have been played from start to finish using them. I have a high-end single GPU (GTX470<\/span>) and as such I generally run 1920×1200 with 2xAA as a minimum, and I\u2019ll gladly reduce other game settings to attain it if needed.<\/p>\n