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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

This.

Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021).

When the 12th generation intel chips came out last month, it was the first time I felt good about the future for chips. (Yes, I know AMD has been kicking their butt, but that's been in core count and power, which aren't as relevant for my son's gaming.)

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The Ryzen 5600X is the gaming CPU of this gen outside of the lower budget Intel chips. Ryzen didn't just win on core count they won in single thread too because competing Intel chips are 120W, which limits their performance on stock cooling. The 5600X is 76W actual.

It was. Now there's 12400F which offers just slightly lower performance(few percent slower) at almost half of the price. And there's 12600k which at the same price offers slightly better performance in gaming than 5600x, but in multithreaded workloads often outperforms 5800x.

that chip can suck down 150W of cooling (which is likely the cooling setup that benchmarks will be running with).

Not going to argue semantics here, but the grandparents point was that cooling the intel chips tends to be where it falls down (thus, the real world may differ significantly), even if there are paper gains in game benchmarks.

Offering a chip which takes double the cooling is just leaning into their point.

It's not just the cooling, it's power usage in general, that's how Intel moved ahead with this generation... 12600K is using 224W compared with 5600X's 134W during the same test (SuperPi stress test where 12600K scored worse at 389s vs. 5600X's 380s).

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that the competition is heating up again, that can only be good news for consumers. But sucking more power to deliver perf gains is totally the wrong direction for this.

12400f costs 180 dollars right now. 5600x costs 300 dollars. They perform similarly in gaming tasks(5600x does have larger L3 cache and in cache-sensitive professional applications it is faster). 12400f draws 117W(intel spec). You won't be running both of these CPUs with their stock coolers so, the difference in CPU cooler costs will be 20 dollars at most(if you are not opting for some kind of water cooling on mid range build, which would be insane). Heck, even if you buy CPU cooler you still end up spending less money than on 5600x with stock cooler.

Game performance, and cooling in general outside of a very specific use case, isn't affected by what the marketing department of Intel says the 10 core AVX wattage of the 12600k is being compared to what the marketing department of AMD says the 6 core AVX wattage of the 5600X is.

When a single core is maxed out the real world measured difference is roughly 12 watts between the two and remember the 12600k is doing slightly more per second than the 5600X. If your gaming device of choice is a laptop that'd be interesting but both are desktop gaming CPUs. If 24/7 all core workload power efficiency is your concern I'd steer you away from either gaming optimized option.

I really like what AMD has done, my last 2 desktop CPUs have been a 3900X and a 5950X, but if I were to buy a entry level gaming CPU right now the 12600k would be very interesting regardless what the all core AVX thermals look like on a stock cooler.

A 12400F is slower than a 5600X in games?

That's really weird because a 11400F has better performance..

There's also the slightly more relevant metrics like IPC which is much lower on Ryzen chips overall. Maybe their single-core speed is a little slower, but they make up for it with incredibly high-performance instruction optimization. 64-bit division on a Coffee Lake CPU is a 36-cycle instruction, with up to a hundred cycles of latency. The same instruction on a Zen3 CPU is no more than 17 cycles, with latency no lower than 12. That's a rather extreme example, but it definitely makes a difference.

My wife has been gaming on a fourth-gen i5 + RX 570 for a few months, and it was mostly fine until Halo Infinite— with that title it was pretty clear that she was CPU bound, with the system chugging on open areas, mob AI, particles, etc.

We upgraded her to a second hand B450 mobo + Ryzen 2400 and that's been fine. Still running on low settings due to the limited GPU, but everything is at least playable. And this motherboard has FW updates that support 5xxx series Ryzens, so there's upgrade headroom there now as well.

Don't upgrade for Halo Infinite. That game also turned my otherwise fine machine into a potato. I've since fixed the issue by not playing halo and playing splitgate instead.

I have plenty of time in both Halo Infinite and Splitgate. Even if you take away the portals, Splitgate doesn't play like Halo Infinite at all. They look and sound similar, but they play and feel very different.

What other metrics are there for a processor in gaming, if not (compute) power per core, as well as core count?

Sure, a gaming computer doesn't need 8 cores as much as an encoder, but AMD's single core performance is right up there with Intel, for much less money.

Disclaimer: AMD fanboy and stockholder

I was using power to mean electricity, not compute power. Thanks for noticing that ambiguity.

As for your comment about core usage in games, I'm still surprised how few cores it takes, even for modern games. Not my knowledge area at all, so all of that part of gaming and computing architecture is a bit opaque to me.

In more CPU demanding games it will start running into trouble. Even on a single-threaded performance level a Ryzen 5600X is about twice as fast as a Core i5-2500k from 2012.

Was it a Xeon processor :)?

Ha - it actually is!!!!

This is too funny - I was about to reply to you, and then decided to check my files. Lo and behold, I found that when I bought the components in March 2012, I bought an Intel E5-2609 (which is indeed a Xeon!) for $299. Had I not looked, I never would have guessed.

Thinking about it now (and I might be wrong), the machine has 32GB of RAM, so I might have bought the Xeon to go above 16GB. Can anyone confirm if that would have made sense at the time (or if my memory is just fuzzy?) ?

Chip details here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/i...

Second hand PC dealers in my country (Turkey) used to put together affordable gaming rigs using old Xeon processors a couple of years back. That's why my first guess was that if it was a Xeon.

I think Xeon processors also have special motherboards, so you can put TWO processors on some of them. That was a huge selling point for computer nerds like me.

Wikipedia says "Because of a hardware limitation not fixed until Ivy Bridge-E in 2013, most older Intel CPUs only support up to 4 gibibit chips for 8 GiB DIMMs". The E5-2609 is at the generation of sandy bridge. So you probably bought the Xeon to support 32GB :).

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