Comment by Cu3PO42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cu3PO42 | Hacker News Reader

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As entirely anecdotal evidence, I upgraded from a 2500k (that I'd been running at 4.5GHz) to a 3600 and the perceived difference in speed is phenomenal. At ~€400 for CPU+Motherboard+RAM it's also great value.

Every day work just feels more snappy and compile times are down by a lot. Single thread is a lot faster and of course having 12 threads instead of 4 makes a huge difference (of course that effect might be less for you since you already have SMT).

Paired with a 1060 I even notice quite a difference in gaming. Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

I haven't done any scientific on the performance improvement, but according to PassMark, I am getting roughly a 120% performance increase on parallelizable workloads, even when taking my OC into account.

> Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

That can happen when the game performance relies on the workload of one thread (or at least less then cores/thread count) that couldn't be properly offloaded to the idle cores. The 3600 has not only more but also stronger cores than the 2500K, and thus even without reaching 100% processor usage before the game can run faster now, because the critical thread runs faster.

You're right, of course. What I meant to say is I was significantly below 100% (around 80) on every single core.

Therefore I really thought it couldn't have been a CPU bottleneck (since one would assume it could have scaled at least another 10% on every core, but in the end it was.

Funnily enough i have a 1060 right now, this entire comment is scarily on point for my exact situation!

Out of curiosity, what was your last GPU?

I didn't change the GPU in this upgrade. I was using a 1060 with the 2500k and am using the 1060 now.

Before that I had a Radeon 6970, that I bought with the 2500k, but I upgraded that in 2016.

I know, I figured you'd upgraded it before at some point. I was just curious. 6970 to 1060 is quite the jump. That must've been great.

Yes, yes, it was! To be honest the fact that the fan turns off during normal desktop operation is almost a bigger deal to me these days, though. I recently looked at my upgrade options and nothing in a price range that I can justify is really attractive. I suppose I need to wait for more than one generation, after all my last upgrade was roughly a four generation jump.

In hindsight upgrading a week or so before an exam might not have been the smartest decision, however.

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