So I want to upgrade at some point in the future. I don't care much for for all the latest games and such, but what I do care is beefy performance in flight sims. After overcloaking my current CPU, core i5 750 from 2.66 mhz to almost 3 ghz briefly, I noticed a pretty good performance increase in DCS. That led me to believe that raw power is what I need, and the pentium G4620 offers just that(plus it really makes mince meat out of my i5 in benchmarks), and its dirt cheap.

The only reason to go on another CPU is that a low end ryzen comes along offering the same as the G4620 for less, or offers more for the same price. That and if it actually sucks to play DCS with it.

DCS cares a lot about the CPU, more so than most games or sims. You're certainly bottle necked with a 750 at this point. Anything newer will help.



The Jedi Master

Don't forgot the both the G4620 and Ryzen chips won't fit in your motherboard. Therefore you should also consider the motherboard prices in your judgement.

They wont fit?! Awwww man! Damn it I cant believe this.......Basically I know

Anyway. I assume that no matter how much newer a cpu I get, if its at the same clock speeds as the one I have now, I wont see any kind of improvement.

Not at all. All clocks are not created equal.

There are improvements in what is called IPC (instructions per clock) that change the landscape considerably.

The old Pentium 4 CPUs exceeded 4GHz with a single core. The Core 2 Duos were a good 1GHz slower but ran code faster even when only one core was in use.

Think of it this way--a terrier and a great dane can both walk at the same speed next to you, but while the dane takes one step for every step you take, the terrier takes 5 or 6. You're all traveling at say 3mph, but the terrier is taking more steps (cycles) to do it. So if you instead say "how far will each go in 100 steps?" the terrier is way behind the dane. So a P4 @4Ghz will be behind a modern CPU @3Ghz.

Likewise, modern CPUs can do more at 3GHz than older ones running at 4GHz could. This is why you need to research the benchmarks, because a 3GHz AMD Bulldozer, a 3GHz Ryzen, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, and a 3GHz Kaby Lake will all give different performance.
Really, the best metric is cost. The OEMs know what their CPUs can do and price them accordingly. A $100 CPU is going to be mediocre for gaming, but ok for basic applications. A $300 CPU will be really good. A $500+ CPU will be overpriced for the small amount of extra performance you see. Always.



The Jedi Master

Jedi that is an excellent explanation of clock speeds, ipc's, and over priced glamour chips.

I even understood it.

Surprisingly I understood it too,,Helped me understand what the computer store was telling me a couple weeks ago bit I didn't really grasp at the time...

Glad I could help shine a little light on what some tech sites get a bit overenthusiastic explaining, getting into the nuts and bolts of prefetch and combining ops and all that jazz.

As I was reminded reading a Ryzen review yesterday, IPC itself is a variable label. It works as a comparison within a given CPU range (ie comparing a recent AMD chip to their brand new one), but can falter if you compare across lines (such as Intel vs AMD) because the companies themselves define it differently.

That's why you may find CPU A is 10% faster than CPU B in this program, about equal in that program, and 15% slower in another one. Even within a product range, going from a cheaper CPU to a more pricey one may net you large gains in some programs and negligible ones in others.
Compilers used and optimizations made that cater to a particular CPU's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses all affect things. Programmers can write code in a way that an Intel chip has no issues with but an AMD chip finds laborious. It may be poor technique, lazy or time-constrained coding, or just plain ignorance, but it will mean an AMD CPU tanks running it because AMD didn't think it important to optimize for code like that, or it runs counter to optimizations they made for other code, or whatever.

As I focus on gaming performance, my search is bit easier. I can disregard many synthetic benchmarks which indicate things like video encoding or file compression performance because I don't use them. If you use your system for multiple tasks, though, you need to consider them.



The Jedi Master

How would I know the IPC of what chip? I'm not really keen on "trusting" the CPU manufacturers and their pricing scheme. It is, after all, capitalism and supply/demand at work and not just IPCs

Like I said, you really can't get that info. What you need to do is visit review sites like pcper.com, hardocp.com, anandtech.com, and others and check their evaluations of the CPU you're looking at compared to others in that class. They do these every time a new CPU comes out, such as now when Ryzen came out, or last fall when Kaby Lake came out.

Then you need to look for the benchmarks in the kind of programs you use. If you just play games it's fairly straightforward, but if you also use productivity software, or use your PC for video editing, or it's dual-use home and work, then you need to look more carefully and broadly.

Buying a CPU is a bit like buying a car. They'll all get you where you want to go, excluding lemons, but your journey will vary wildly depending on what you spend and what road you take to get there.

You can definitely say "in program X, this CPU is faster than this one, which is faster than this one" and so on. As soon as you switch that to two or more programs, no one CPU is best in all scenarios.

That's why when someone asks here "which CPU should I get?" we always ask..."well what do you want to do with it and how much are you willing to spend?"



The Jedi Master