PC Build (CPU)

Hello all! Today, I officially start to discuss the build. I have a lot to say and a few links for y'all to watch, so without further ado, let's get started!

As the poll stated there were more people interested in an Intel chip, I went with Intel. AMD chips are certainly not bad for gaming, however, I do feel that Intel is better. AMD does have lots of low budget options, but that's not what we are going for today. Firstly, I have chosen a quad core chip with 4 threads. Basically, this means it does not have hyperthreading, which can be a nice feature. As you will soon see, my good pal Linus has a lot of quality content that applies to this build.



So now that we know what hyperthreading is, we won't be using it anyway. Anyway, it is used for i3 chips (dual core with hyperthreading, 4 threads) and i7 chips (quad core with hyperthreading, 8 threads). Cores matter more for gaming usually than threads, so I just went with a Skylake i5 6400. This chip comes in at about $180, and as far as price to performance, its pretty great. As it turns out, Minecraft is fairly CPU intensive. At least for Minecraft, I do not recommend a dual core processor. Now, if you don't mind playing Minecraft without any Resource Packs or Shaders, you probably don't need this much of a CPU. But I mean, if you could, why wouldn't you?

This guy right here has a system that is similar to ours, so the fps will also be very similar to our build.



As you can see, he was able to get about 80-100 fps with a very nice Shader and a render distance of 16. If you turned that down a bit and adjusted some other settings, you could easily get a constant 60 fps with a nice texture pack. If you don't believe me, I recommend going to YouTube and typing "i5 6400 gtx 960 4gb minecraft" in the search box (spoiler for the GPU in this build).

However, this build does not stop here! It is capable at running new and demanding titles such as GTA 5, Fallout 4, Battlefield 4, Crisis 3, Arkham Knight, and Rise of the Tomb Raider at medium to very high settings at perfectly respectable framerates. Obviously, it is also capable of maxing out older titles such as Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, as well as many others. The 6400 is great for other things such as photoshop and light video editing, although if you plan on being a professional video editor, I would go with a Macbook Pro, due to the insane optimization in FinalCut, with video production way over 10 times better than even a $5000 PC.



Alternate parts: Pentium G4440 $60 Dual core w/out hyperthreading (bare minimum, do not get this unless you are broke).
i3 6100 $110 Dual core with hyperthreading (not a bad CPU at all, but the extra 2 cores of the i5 6400 helps out a lot in certain games and tasks).

Thanks for reading guys, and if you have any questions, do not be afraid to comment below. Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, the motherboard!

http://meepcraft.com/threads/pc-build-intro.58243/

 

Cores and threads are not really separable, though it depends on the application. If you have a game that multithreads really well, then more threads is better, since you don't have to spend CPU cycles suspending threads and resuming others. Most games out there these days do this very well, and hyperthreading will buy you a performance boost versus non-hyperthreading, even when core count is unchanged.

The number of cores has no bearing on Minecraft, which is a single-threaded application, by design (they couldn't figure out how to get block updates sequenced properly in a multithreaded design, which would effectively trash redstone circuits). The JVM can still spawn other threads for garbage collection, class loading, and other low-level system functions, but all Minecraft code will run as one thread, and therefore run on one core. On a hyperthreaded core, it'll only get half a core, as it'll only run on one virtual processor.

My hyperthreaded 6-way i7 still stays at 60fps without breaking a sweat, though.

 

While I agree to a certain extent, a better CPU will always get you more performance, even in Minecraft.

 

Honestly who needs performance in Minecraft.... the graphics are garbage anyway.

But yeah, anyone that says AMD is better than Intel is a delusional fanboy.

I made an Intel build i7 4770k, 780ti so on... about 3-4 years ago. It really runs anything you throw at it.

 

There are better things out there now, but that was a top of the line build a few years ago, so it's still quite relevant.