What is the best CPU for games like CIV4?

Phenom II X6 1090T (3.2GHz) seems nice at $285

 

I found the benchmarks of the two new Phenom II X6 rather unimpressive. The Phenom II X4 955 is still the king of performance per $.

 

I stand corrected

 

@$149.99 the 1055T is now the

 

that's a lot of power for the price

 

Bear in mind, its still a rebate, which you may or may not get. If you need as many cores as possible though, it's pretty much your best choice no matter what.

 

What about these new Dual Core I5 processors? I5-860 for example, 3.6 GHz for 300 Euro.

 

sure you don't mean i7?

 

That's a really bad deal. The i5-750 is currently the best bang-for-the-buck processor intel offers. Its massively overclockable and even at stock speeds its a respectable processor. Best of all, it's only 200 USD right now.

Your model numbers and speeds are also a bit off. The 860 is an i7 part, and it's stock speed is 2.8ghz, not 3.6

 

Intel's new naming scheme can be pretty confusing for anyone that doesn't follow the computer hardware world regularly.

the i5-750 and the i7-860 are basically the same processor (Lynnfield), the difference is that on the i5-750 the Intel Turbo Boost and CPU multiplier are slightly lower (meaning less MHz)and HyperThreading is disabled.

Compared to other i5 processors, the i5-750 lacks an integrated GPU and has 4 cores instead of 2.

Performance wise the i5-750 is very good and @$200 its really the only Intel processor that offers a price/performance ratio close to AMD's offerings.

 

And because the two CPU's are pretty much the same die, like you said, it has overclocking potential to get to at least to the i7-860's speed, and then some. Bit-Tech got the i5-750 to run at 4.37gHz, which is amazing for a 2.6gHz stock part. Even if you only get half of that kind of overclock, you're still going to be running it at 3.4gHz

 

Sorry, I mixed the two numbers there, I meant the new i5-680, which has only two cores, but 3.6 GHz, which is the highest of all the cpus, so it should be best for Civ4, right? And probably Civ5, too.

 

It may be the fastest, but fastest is not the best. There has always been a sweet spot in price/performance. That sweet spot at the moment is the i5-750. I would easily say that it is the best.

 

I havent seen any benchmark of the i5-680, but the i5-670 (133MHz/1x Multiplier slower), is on average 20% slower than the i5-750. Civ4's lack of (good) multithreading could possibly mean that the game will run faster on the 680 than the 750, but there is no way that Civ5 will make that same mistake now that multicore cpu's are the standard.

Also its worth noting that i5-680 costs more than the i7-860 which has 2 more cores and is probably on average 30% faster, while fitting on the same motherboards.

If having the fastest chip with integrated graphics is the goal the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T paired with a 890GX motherboard (Radeon HD 4290 IGP) gives vastly superior productivity performance at the same price.

 

And just how would that IGP handle civ5?

 

Considerably better than on Intels GMA HD.

But i seriously doubt that anyone whom has to get a Workstation with an IGP would be allowed to install and play Civ5 on it.

 

Okay, but you know, I play only civ and manager games - do I need to care about FPS?
So maybe IGP will be enough for me? Or a little card like HD5670 or even HD5570?

 

Yeah, it's like comparing a Pentium IV to a Core 2

AMD own ATI so their Integrated GPUs are awesome

 

You could probably be able to run Civ5 on the latest generation IGP if you turn all the eye candy out, the HD5570 will probably run Civ5 with some decent eye candy on, but since you can get the much more powerful HD5670 for the same price (€70-80, the cheapest HD5670 is actually €3.35 cheaper than the cheapest HD5570 here in the Netherlands ) that would be a considerably better budget card. Mainstream gaming cards start from €95 with the much better HD5750 and for €115 you can get the HD5770 which is practically twice as fast as the HD5670 and can probably run Civ5 with most options on. (After that prices jump to €200/240 which cant obviously be called mainstream gaming anymore).

The latest Intel IGP (GMA HD) is vastly superiour to his predecessors but still noticeably inferiour (10-30%) to AMD/ATI's latest offering, the only advantage right now is the much lower power consumption of the Intel solution. That will likely remain the case until next year's AMD Fusion processors are released.

Ironically the ones hurt most by these developments are nVidia, with their chipset based IGP becoming obsolete (was 25% of their revenue) and an apparently failing strategy to replace that with lines of OEM only cards (eg GT300) they really need to re-invent themselves or end up like S3 (Maybe Intel would buy them, they could sure use the GPU technology, much better than the Larrabee approach).

 

okay, more like Core vs. Core 2