**The Importance of Core Count in 2019: A Gaming Perspective**

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, we've been running a series of tests to determine the importance of core count in gaming. Now that we've gotten all the boring stuff out of the way, let's dive into the actual benchmarks.

**Apex Legends Benchmarks**

If you only play Apex Legends, it doesn't make a huge difference between quad-core and higher-end CPUs. There is a bit of a dip when it comes to the 0.1% lows, but it doesn't drop below 60 frames per second yet, so it shouldn't be much of an issue. However, from my subjective gaming experience, Apex Legends did feel different.

**Battlefield V Benchmarks**

Things aren't looking good for quad-core CPUs when it comes to Battlefield V. Especially when you turn hyper-threading off on the 4-core configuration, the average framerate drops quite a lot. The 0.1% minimum, which is more important in my opinion for general gaming experience, also takes a hit.

**Anthem Benchmarks**

Moving on to Anthem, this was really infuriating because nothing I could do could get the test set up to run at 4 cores with no hyper-threading. However, there does seem to be a neat downwards trend in Anthem as you slowly turn cores off and go down the setup.

**Resident Evil 2 Benchmarks**

When looking at Resident Evil 2, it doesn't make a huge difference when you have the only quad-core setup. The 0.1% minimum drops quite a bit, but it's not substantial and barely drops below 60 frames per second. So, you shouldn't feel it.

**Conclusion: Core Count in Gaming**

So, what do these tests tell us about the importance of core count in 2019? Honestly, it doesn't seem to matter massively unless you have four cores and eight threads. If you have an older generation i-5 now may be a good time to start thinking about upgrading, especially with the up-and-coming release of new CPUs.

**Which CPU to Buy**

Don't buy into the more expensive CPUs in the lineup because it seems that for gaming the extra cores and threads don't necessarily make sense. For example, if you compare the i9-9900K versus the i7-9700K, the extra money you're spending for the i9 is not really going to do anything for your gaming performance.

**Rising CPUs**

If all you're doing is gaming, Horizon 5 is a really good bet at the moment. However, I wouldn't necessarily buy a CPU right now because we're just around the corner from the 7 nanometer rise in CPU release and if they're awesome it means that we have an awesome CPU to buy and then if they're lame we can buy something else.

**Final Thoughts**

One thing that we know now is that we shouldn't necessarily fall into the marketing trap of buying the highest core out CPU we can get our hands on. That's all for this video, if you liked it do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit seems that every year every single tech youtuber releases a video about whether or not core count is important for gaming in that year so I decided to do my own tests and it seems that it doesn't matter it's not important unless you have one specific configuration which means it is important so yeah it does matter in 2019 the reason that I actually wanted to do this video is because I recently did another video where I was testing a vago frontier Edition versus a gtx 1080 and in that video i used an i-5 7600 k overclock to 4.5 gigahertz for all of the testing and then when I was finished with that video I took the GTX 1080 out of the PC I put a water block on it and I put it back in my main editing PC which has a risin 7 1700 X so it's one of the first generation rising CPUs and the first thing that I noticed was well it felt a lot smoother on the Rison system especially the 0.1% lows so the actual dips in framerate felt a lot less drastic than it did on the Intel system which I found really weird because the entire system was overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz whereas the Rison system I usually run it around 3.9 gigahertz so to lower a core speed and it's supposedly a CPU that's worse at gaming than the Intel alternative so is 2019 finally the year that the unhype earth threaded quad core CPU becomes obsolete well let's do some testing to find out now I'm gonna go about doing the testing today is I'm gonna take the same Rison 7 1700 X CPU for all of the tests and then I'm gonna use Rison master and the bios to switch off hyper-threading and cores for the various test configurations that I want to do for the video now I think this is a really good way of testing it because I'm using the same CPU for all of the tests it means that the only variable is the actual core account that I have active before the specific test now the configurations that I'm gonna test today is 8 cores with hyper-threading on so that's 8 cores and 16 threads and then we're gonna test just 8 cores without hyper threading on and then we're going to do 6 cores 12 threads and in just six cores and in four cores eight threads and then just four cores so that we can see if there's an actual drop in performance as you go down the core count now one of the reasons that I think this is a very relevant question is because all of these configurations are ways in which manufacturers separate their various CPUs from each other now let's have a look at the games that I'm gonna be testing in these various configurations now I obviously have to test games that were released in 2019 otherwise there's no point in doing a core count in 2019 video if I'm testing a bunch of games that were released in 2017 so the first game that I decided to do was Apex legends which don't actually know if that was released in 2019 images manga check apex legends 2019 we're good and in the second game that we're gonna do is Resident Evil 2 which has been very well received by people that was also released in 2019 the other game is going to be anthem which is I don't know how many of you are actually playing anthem because I don't think it's a very good game but I actually there was a little bit of a snag with the testing but we'll get into that later and then the final game is battlefield 5 now I know that battlefield 5 was technically released in the end of 2018 but the end of 2019 I mean 18 is pretty much 2019 so hopefully you'll let that slide now unfortunately I am only testing four games for this video which is quite disappointing but honestly actually doing these benchmarks took me super long because of system instability and how weird the rise in master software was with turning cores off and then nothing works and then you just have to it was it was a bit of a nightmare but I know that for games is just kind of not as good as Hardware unboxed for example they're probably gonna be really disappointed in the fact that I don't at least have 37 games in this test lineup so Steve I failed you I'm sorry and now before we get into the actual benchmarks let's just do a quick rundown of the system that I used for these tests as far as RAM goes I have 16 gigs of Dom plats in the system it's ddr4 3000 speed and then I used the GTX 1080 which was a liquid-cooled and it wasn't manually overclocked it was just kind of left to do its own thing and then the CPU was overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz for all of the tests so there was an exact chorus feed running for all of the configurations and then when it comes to the games I tested them all at 1080p resolution at Ultra settings and I with all of the boring stuff out of the way let's have a look at the actual benchmarks oh it's not looking great for the quad-core okay so if you play only apex legends it doesn't make a huge difference there is a bit of a dip when it comes to the 0.1% lows but the thing is it doesn't dip below 60 frames per second yet so it shouldn't be much of an issue but honestly I have to say that from my subjective gaming experience apex Legends did feel different now things aren't looking good for the quad core when you take battlefield 5 into account because especially when you turn hyper-threading off on the 4 core configuration the average framerate drops quite a lot and one of the things that drops the most is the 0.1% minimum which is more important in my opinion for general gaming experience but what this means is that if you have an i7 from that generation you should be fine but the 7600 K and the 6600 K and the all the previous generations of i5s are starting to get a bit long in the tooth when moving on to anthem this was really infuriating because nothing I could do could get the test set up to run at 4 cores no hyper threading it worked with all of the rest of them no problem at all but the moment that I tried the 4 core configuration it just didn't work and I tried for hours to get it running and I actually tried again the next day and I just couldn't get that configuration to work which is really infuriating because that's one of the most important results in my opinion for this test but there does seem to be a very neat downwards trend in anthem as you slowly turn cores off and go down the setup but yeah that's a really big issue with this test is that I couldn't get the four core set up to work when looking at resident evil 2 it doesn't make a huge difference when you have the only quad core setup then your 0.1 percent minimum drops quite a bit but it's not substantial and it barely drops below 60 frames per second so you shouldn't feel it honestly I couldn't really feel it while doing the testing so in conclusion what do these tests tell us about the importance of core count in 2019 well honestly it doesn't seem to matter massively unless you four cores and eight threads so if you have an older generation i-5 now may be a good time to start thinking about upgrading especially with the up-and-coming release of the new rising CPUs they may be a good bet for most of us and then what these tests tell us in the way of which CPUs we should buy don't buy into the more expensive CPUs in the lineup because it seems that for gaming the extra cores and threads don't necessarily make sense so for example if you compare the I $9.99 hundred K versus the 9700 K the extra money you're spending for the i9 is not really going to do anything for your gaming performance and you can actually spend it on a better graphics card or more RGB swag or whatever it is that you want to spend your money on and then when it comes to what rise in CPUs to buy if all you're doing is gaming horizon 5 is a really good bet at the moment although I wouldn't necessarily buy a CPU right now because we're just around the corner from the 7 nanometer rise in CPU release and if they're awesome it means that we have an awesome CPU to buy and then if they're lame we can buy something else but one thing that we know now is that we shouldn't necessarily fall into the marketing trap of buying the highest cork out CPU we can get our hands on and with that it brings me to the end of this video if you liked the video do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one I have an Instagram and a Twitter feed so you can go check those out to see if there's anything interesting that for you and yeah I think until the next video have a good one bye bye have a good one I've never said thatit seems that every year every single tech youtuber releases a video about whether or not core count is important for gaming in that year so I decided to do my own tests and it seems that it doesn't matter it's not important unless you have one specific configuration which means it is important so yeah it does matter in 2019 the reason that I actually wanted to do this video is because I recently did another video where I was testing a vago frontier Edition versus a gtx 1080 and in that video i used an i-5 7600 k overclock to 4.5 gigahertz for all of the testing and then when I was finished with that video I took the GTX 1080 out of the PC I put a water block on it and I put it back in my main editing PC which has a risin 7 1700 X so it's one of the first generation rising CPUs and the first thing that I noticed was well it felt a lot smoother on the Rison system especially the 0.1% lows so the actual dips in framerate felt a lot less drastic than it did on the Intel system which I found really weird because the entire system was overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz whereas the Rison system I usually run it around 3.9 gigahertz so to lower a core speed and it's supposedly a CPU that's worse at gaming than the Intel alternative so is 2019 finally the year that the unhype earth threaded quad core CPU becomes obsolete well let's do some testing to find out now I'm gonna go about doing the testing today is I'm gonna take the same Rison 7 1700 X CPU for all of the tests and then I'm gonna use Rison master and the bios to switch off hyper-threading and cores for the various test configurations that I want to do for the video now I think this is a really good way of testing it because I'm using the same CPU for all of the tests it means that the only variable is the actual core account that I have active before the specific test now the configurations that I'm gonna test today is 8 cores with hyper-threading on so that's 8 cores and 16 threads and then we're gonna test just 8 cores without hyper threading on and then we're going to do 6 cores 12 threads and in just six cores and in four cores eight threads and then just four cores so that we can see if there's an actual drop in performance as you go down the core count now one of the reasons that I think this is a very relevant question is because all of these configurations are ways in which manufacturers separate their various CPUs from each other now let's have a look at the games that I'm gonna be testing in these various configurations now I obviously have to test games that were released in 2019 otherwise there's no point in doing a core count in 2019 video if I'm testing a bunch of games that were released in 2017 so the first game that I decided to do was Apex legends which don't actually know if that was released in 2019 images manga check apex legends 2019 we're good and in the second game that we're gonna do is Resident Evil 2 which has been very well received by people that was also released in 2019 the other game is going to be anthem which is I don't know how many of you are actually playing anthem because I don't think it's a very good game but I actually there was a little bit of a snag with the testing but we'll get into that later and then the final game is battlefield 5 now I know that battlefield 5 was technically released in the end of 2018 but the end of 2019 I mean 18 is pretty much 2019 so hopefully you'll let that slide now unfortunately I am only testing four games for this video which is quite disappointing but honestly actually doing these benchmarks took me super long because of system instability and how weird the rise in master software was with turning cores off and then nothing works and then you just have to it was it was a bit of a nightmare but I know that for games is just kind of not as good as Hardware unboxed for example they're probably gonna be really disappointed in the fact that I don't at least have 37 games in this test lineup so Steve I failed you I'm sorry and now before we get into the actual benchmarks let's just do a quick rundown of the system that I used for these tests as far as RAM goes I have 16 gigs of Dom plats in the system it's ddr4 3000 speed and then I used the GTX 1080 which was a liquid-cooled and it wasn't manually overclocked it was just kind of left to do its own thing and then the CPU was overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz for all of the tests so there was an exact chorus feed running for all of the configurations and then when it comes to the games I tested them all at 1080p resolution at Ultra settings and I with all of the boring stuff out of the way let's have a look at the actual benchmarks oh it's not looking great for the quad-core okay so if you play only apex legends it doesn't make a huge difference there is a bit of a dip when it comes to the 0.1% lows but the thing is it doesn't dip below 60 frames per second yet so it shouldn't be much of an issue but honestly I have to say that from my subjective gaming experience apex Legends did feel different now things aren't looking good for the quad core when you take battlefield 5 into account because especially when you turn hyper-threading off on the 4 core configuration the average framerate drops quite a lot and one of the things that drops the most is the 0.1% minimum which is more important in my opinion for general gaming experience but what this means is that if you have an i7 from that generation you should be fine but the 7600 K and the 6600 K and the all the previous generations of i5s are starting to get a bit long in the tooth when moving on to anthem this was really infuriating because nothing I could do could get the test set up to run at 4 cores no hyper threading it worked with all of the rest of them no problem at all but the moment that I tried the 4 core configuration it just didn't work and I tried for hours to get it running and I actually tried again the next day and I just couldn't get that configuration to work which is really infuriating because that's one of the most important results in my opinion for this test but there does seem to be a very neat downwards trend in anthem as you slowly turn cores off and go down the setup but yeah that's a really big issue with this test is that I couldn't get the four core set up to work when looking at resident evil 2 it doesn't make a huge difference when you have the only quad core setup then your 0.1 percent minimum drops quite a bit but it's not substantial and it barely drops below 60 frames per second so you shouldn't feel it honestly I couldn't really feel it while doing the testing so in conclusion what do these tests tell us about the importance of core count in 2019 well honestly it doesn't seem to matter massively unless you four cores and eight threads so if you have an older generation i-5 now may be a good time to start thinking about upgrading especially with the up-and-coming release of the new rising CPUs they may be a good bet for most of us and then what these tests tell us in the way of which CPUs we should buy don't buy into the more expensive CPUs in the lineup because it seems that for gaming the extra cores and threads don't necessarily make sense so for example if you compare the I $9.99 hundred K versus the 9700 K the extra money you're spending for the i9 is not really going to do anything for your gaming performance and you can actually spend it on a better graphics card or more RGB swag or whatever it is that you want to spend your money on and then when it comes to what rise in CPUs to buy if all you're doing is gaming horizon 5 is a really good bet at the moment although I wouldn't necessarily buy a CPU right now because we're just around the corner from the 7 nanometer rise in CPU release and if they're awesome it means that we have an awesome CPU to buy and then if they're lame we can buy something else but one thing that we know now is that we shouldn't necessarily fall into the marketing trap of buying the highest cork out CPU we can get our hands on and with that it brings me to the end of this video if you liked the video do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one I have an Instagram and a Twitter feed so you can go check those out to see if there's anything interesting that for you and yeah I think until the next video have a good one bye bye have a good one I've never said that