i5 760 or i7 870/875 for 10 boxing?

[Sam DeathWalker]

So in the most ideal pie baking algorithm, all your pies are waiting in front of the oven to get baked, no time is wasted with empty ovens cause of the transfer of pies, and the time the oven is open (losing heat) is minimized as much as possible. Taking this example back to the real world, hyper threading is optimizing cpu processes that minimize the need to move subtask in and out of the cpu, so in this way it minimized the overhead of memory accounting (less cpu usage – but necessary the logical unit) and maximize the times the cpu is “working”.

In summing, more ovens, faster pies get done, but if you only need to bake ONE pie, don’t matter if you have 100 ovens or 1, it will take the same time.

And WoW is written for 2 cores, it gets the pies to two ovens at the optimal times. There is no reason to assume that a system that gets the pies to two ovens at the optimal time would work faster with 4 or more ovens.......

[Ishar]

Well, from a strictly logical point of view...

If wow A Threads because it has to wait for some slow task (eg, a hdd read, or user input), and manages to do some computation in the mean time for whatever reason...

Wow b is also going to thread in more or less the same way, for the same reason. (because its going to have a similar load at the same time, if not exactly identical).

Actually, given the nature of boxing, all 10 wows are probably going to frequently be waiting for the same slow task. I think its a reasonable assumption that all 10 will ask the OS to do something.

At this point windows will route requests to processors, as you say. (the 10 trillion tasks=p). Now, at this point, the question becomes a bit more complex. In your typical game, the 10 trillion tasks are not inherently parallel. (Eg, running 1 copy of wow, of course, any more than 2 cores is wasted on wow, though it keeps miscellaneous tasks from detracting from the processor time of wow; cause they are more likely to have an empty core.) Wow is hardly a game that only needs to bake one pie....and this is more a failure of programming. I have trouble believing that in the course of the game there is absolutely nothing that can be done in parallel. And If i'm running the same game twice, all those tasks have to be done twice, even if they aren't parallel within themselves, when done twice, well... Point in case, sitting in the middle of nowhere well after loading the game, one instance of wow is using 10-20% of my CPU while minimized, and has 60 or so threads going. (I assume because of addons, but still). I think its safe to safe to assume that wow is not completely hard drive bound.

So, the question becomes, is the 1090T faster at doing those tasks than the Intel at the same price point? (its a forgone conclusion that the Intel 980x is far and away superior, but is also roughly 4 times the cost..) The midrange i7s is another comparison entirely. And I honestly don't know, meh.

edit: Yeah, the processor I listed is an overclocked version of a slightly cheaper processor. I was mainly pointing out that AMD had a 6 core for roughly the same price as the quad core i7s. Some people (myself included) are not really comfortable with overclocking.)

[Sam DeathWalker]

That makes sense; with one wow client no more then two cores is ever needed, with 5 wow clients then things change and you could resonablly assign 2 cores for each client (or one each).

That assumes each core has its own seperate path to the system ram and with multiple cores running the data buss feeding those cores dosn't get saturated (but that buss is probably the biggest and fastest in the whole computer).

Its not like 4 cores will run 2 clients twice as fast as a 2 core cpu... thats just not going to happen.

But I can see where there will be some advantage in more cores with more clients.

But its going to be hard to guess at how much more performace you will get vs. getting 2 cores at a faster clock speed. Or comparing a faster 4 core to a slower 8 core ....

I think best rule of thumb is to find the normal cpu sweet spot (most bang for buck) and not say pay double to go from 4 to 8 cores at the same cpu speed.

Just get the i7 that delivers the most bang for buck on most tasks and you should be right enough for wow.

Ya me also I never overclock, if you want a faster processor just go buy one.