Upgrade Suggestions/Specs

If you setup a round robin CPU strategy, more cores is going to be better. - vote 1 AMD.
If you don't and throw in all cores (usually because you are limited on cores), then IPC is going to be better - vote 1 Intel.
If you need more processing for a single thread, GHz and IPC matter. vote 2 Intel.
If you need more threads, and as long as the GHz is about 3 - 3.5. vote 2 AMD.
If you are money savvy. vote 3 AMD.
If you are not money savvy. vote 3 Intel.
If you are a brand fan. vote either way.

mmmmm. damn hard to know which way to go. TR's have some interesting quirks to them, but overall performance is pretty decent bang for buck, if a little down on Intel cpus in certain scenarios. That said, not very many reviews focus on multiboxing, so don't quite put them under the same level of diverse strain that multiboxing does, which impacts both CPU and GPU, and floods pretty much all it can in memory and disk I/O. Multiboxing is a funny conundrum that would actually test hardware fairly well, but no well known hardware reviewer out there does it (reviews on it that is).

Personally, I don't think you could go wrong. BUT, I don't have a TR. If I was to fund a new system, I probably would have a TR. My normal use cases do not warrant the extra money for a Intel CPU (video rendering is an area where intel have an advantage), and I could better spend that cash elsewhere, like GPU/RAM/NVMe/food for my starving children.

Thanks for reply.

Yes these were my thoughts as well. Especially about the CPU strategy functionality in isboxer and what you said about if i need more processing on a single thread. Which was one of my questions if i did actually need more processing power per thread with my intended usage or if more cores are better (and considering its not all that big of a performance difference per thread in comparison to the performance increase from more cores if they can be used).

I just wanted to see if there were any non obvious things that i was missing. Such as i said before if the cpu strategy can make it use the other cores well even though the games are single threaded. And any other quirks
such as the way TR uses the game mode setting to split the cores in half in a 4+4 CCX config. Ryzen 2700x does something similar. And if this would affect the way isboxer can utilize the cores. Explained here https://www.anandtech.com/show/11726...re-performance Or even the way games and anything else handles this in general. Part of the reason amd benefits from high speed ram. Seems to me that quirks such as these might be what sometimes make AMD performance and compatibility irregular. And i question if there is also less coding for dealing with any of these vs how well people optimize for intel. I'm really not well versed on the answers to those thoughts.

It's never as straight forward as a simple google search of performance, IPC, ghz or whatever lol

If you are multiboxing, I wouldn't be turning on game mode. Defeats the whole purpose of having many cores. If anything, I'd be setting up so each game could only use the threads of one CCX (which is effectively what Game Mode does, but it does it by disabling CCX's rather than using thread affinity which is what ISBoxer does). Then all you do is assign games to alternate CCX's so you spread the load where you want it.

And no game designed in the last 15 years or so is truly single threaded. Sometimes they favour a single thread, but even the most basic apps tend to spin up several threads at a time.

The difference between AMD and Intel if both are well above average spec recommendations is going to be tough to quantify.

The difference between AMD and Intel at borderline speeds and with the rest of your system all borderline components is going to be significant.

Looking back through this thread, I see 6 AO clients. How many cores get utilized when running a single AO client? If the answer is "2" then you're going to start doubling up on the 9900k after the 4th client. With the 1950x, they can all run dedicated 2c/4t each. Assuming the single-client performance is the same on both and there are no compatibility issues to deal with on the AMD, the AMD would benefit you more from a raw power perspective.

All that aside, the assumption is that the AMD is as good at resource sharing as the Intels. We have some very limited anecdotal data around here about this but it is really skinny on detail and not done in the fashion of a pure "only changing the CPU, all other components are the same" benchmark, so it's really hard to say how much better a 1950x would be versus a 9900k. With like 20+ game clients, I think it would heavily favor the higher core count, but at 6, it's tough to guess.

Thanks. Yeah im skipping intel this time. Although you mention 20+ game clients...even on a 16 core that seems harsh. Im not getting the greatest performance with 6 clients on a 4.7ghz 4790k (15 fps background, 60 foreground and i usually get 30-45 on foreground right now, and im wanting to add 2 more clients). My SLI 970s are running about 60% so that shouldnt be it, at least from a pure performance perspective. Ram is free. I hope this CPU upgrade will do it. Although i would also consider grabbing a used 1080 ti if necessary, like if i need more vram. But its only using 2-3gb. The thing is though that people say how much resources are being used but im not sure that says it all as i know with ram resource management can minimize ram usage but if you have more it will use it and be able to access more more quickly. Id think the same would hold true for Vram. Not sure though. I dont think just looking at how much is being used really tells the whole story as to what can be used.

if your cpu usage is at 100%... your ram usage is maxed...and your vram usage is maxed.... either will limit your fps, as you are litterarly capped. You cant create more free resources at that point.

If you have to run two games at the same cpu cores instead of having 1 game dedicated to 2 cores, you will also have reduced performance available. 1 cpu core and its 1 hyperthreaded core doesnt mean 2 cores, its more like 1,3 in performance. Your cpu have "1,3 x 4" available and you are running a lot of games on it. That your mains fps dips to 30 makes sense.

Thats it. In a nutshell.

To overcome this, you can either get more computer resources and or play with the settings to try tweak a bit more fps out of it. Though if i were you, i would get a lot more cpu cores.

I was debating this exact issue until recently. Someone ( Mirai, I believe) mentioned in the thread I created that the 9900K was due to be released shortly. I did a little research and discovered that Intel will be refreshing the entire Coffee Lake line shortly (Q4-2018, supposedly.)

Since then I've decided to hold off a little on upgrading and wait for the i9-9920X or 9940X. Higher cache, higher clocks 12cores/24threads with Intel IPC & I'm fairly sure should outperform the TR2950X significantly across the board for boxing and single threaded use.



Something I've been wondering lately that's kind of unrelated to this thread but does anybody know if Lax considered leveraging the onboard graphics available on many Intel CPU's? I've read that the UHD Graphics 630 is sufficient to run a WoW client by itself. I don't propose to use it for that task but I wonder if there's some way to use it as a resource to alleviate some processing power.