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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile I have an i5-9600k in a case that is smaller than a Playstation 5 using a cooler that is only a bit bigger than those old stock coolers. It comfortably idles around 40c and peaks at 70c.

What are people even doing on these newest CPUs? Video rendering? Servers? Because if they are playing games it is a huge waste of power.

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Not sure how this generalises, but for video editing - less rendering, which is already fast for most workloads, but the actual tasks of editing, grading etc - CPUs are still nowhere near fast enough. You can easily bring a modern machine to its knees realtime editing 4K or 6K H264 / H265 video with grading at native resolution. Let alone 8K video. Dedicated pipelines for decompressing various video codecs on the fly (including ProRes) are part of the reason Macbook Pros sell so well for video tasks. Another is that you can run them unplugged without slowdown, which is incredibly useful for video editors (good luck editing on a train, plane or back seat of a cab with a windows laptop).

All that said, DaVinci Resolve which is increasingly taking over from Premiere for many commercial editors, is more GPU than CPU bound. Lots of sales of the current fastest GPU Nvidia's RTX 4090 to this market.

If you ran a newer CPU at the effective performance of a 9600k you could probably get away with a passive cooler.

A last-gen i5 mobile processor outperforms at 9600k with a 45W TDP.

People make a ton of noise about the efficiency of processors that are explicitly designed to be the hotrods of desktop computing: meanwhile we've also seen the bottom end get significantly faster over the years. Conversely, the floor for TDPs have barely risen.

Why is rendering video (likely for entertainment) not a waste of power, where playing video games (entertainment) is?

Ah, that is not what I meant. Such a powerful CPU is a "waste" in a computer meant for gaming because it can never be utilized. It will never be the bottleneck of such a system and you can run your games just as well on a less powerful CPU.

The energy used for such activities is another question.

It depends on the game, settings the user is running it at, and desired framerate and resolution. A number of games are partially CPU-bound and not well multithreaded, which means the only way to get them consistently at or above certain framerates is to pump IPC, which usually means buying the higher end CPUs.

Are there any games out right now that an i5-9600k would struggle with?

I was using about 60% of my cpu running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p 120fps. Maybe if you wanted to run it at 8k using an RTX 4090.

There are some that won't consistently stay above certain framerates in some circumstances. World of Warcraft for instance performs tangibly better on newer CPUs in settings like 40v40 team fights in battlegrounds for example due to how CPU-bound it is — on a 9600k it'll struggle to stay above 120FPS and occasionally dip below 60FPS.

DCS[0] in multiplayer. Horribly single-threaded at the moment, no CPU on the planet is good enough for a really busy map, running a bunch of detailed flight and systems models. They’re working on it, but they’ve been working on it for years. Typical small market development constraints.

[0] https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/

Yes, definitely. Many FPS gamers as a matter of visual advantage wish to run their FPS game at the highest possible framerate, or at least as fast as their display. This usually means 144-300+ fps. And it needs to be pegged at a consistent rate (so even in the most graphically intense moments). Achieving this even on low settings and with a high end GPU is not always possible, and a high end CPU and high end RAM are required to be consistent, especially for 1440p and 4k.

Cities Skylines once you get to a fairly large city size. Arma 3 can also get extremely cpu heavy depending on the map.

My take is this:

If I see 90%+ CPU load (being "efficient"), I need a bigger CPU.

If I hardly see any CPU load, I am being effective.

Ergo, the biggest CPU I can afford is the best choice.

I don't consider unused CPU power as waste, I see it as relief from worrying about capping out.

90%+ CPU load at... what frequency? That rule doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are meaning "90%+ load while sustaining maximum core clocks"

Modern systems are going to ramp the clock speed as utilization increases, if you're seeing sustained 90% cpu, chances are you're running pretty close to the sustained clock limit.

Edit: I accept your findings, and will pay closer attention to see if I can see the same.

I would have agreed with you on this if it weren’t for the fact I have noticed a lot of newer systems (granted, running windows) having sustained 80-90% loads and when I got to investigate they are several steps from max frequencies.

These have been 7th gen and higher i5/i7 machines and newer J4xxx series celerons.

Haven’t had any AMD kit to compare though.

And I should clarify that they haven’t been thermally throttled.

At whatever maximum frequency.

Let me put it a different way: If I'm playing a game and I'm barely using 20~40% CPU, I'm doing good. That 60~80% unused CPU processing headroom is my ability to be worryfree about capping out.

Which is to say: Yes, my 12700K is massive bloody overkill for my day to day activities, but it is 300% adequate for my needs and concerns and I love it. I'll probably upgrade it to a 13700K or 13900K(S) depending on the price a year or two down, since my mobo can accept it (thanks Intel!).

Aah. Kk thanks for reply. I'm a dev so I like having those ghz around for other uses as well.

Some games are still single-thread CPU bound, eg. KSP (even after the multithreading enhancements were implemented my understanding and anecdotal sense is most of the bottlenecking math is still sequential in one thread).

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