I am thinking of replacing my late-2009 iMac with a new HP Windows 10 machine. But I don’t know which to get. One is running an i7-5960x (6 cores), the other one which is about $1000 cheaper is running an i7-4790 (4 cores). (For gaming both have the 4GB GeForce GTX 980)
I want a high-spec machine to future-proof it against the rising recommended specs for development and gaming PCs. (I had my iMac for almost 5 years and it is slow loading MonoDevelop and Unity projects and it can’t run the newer 3D games anymore. Also, since I am 66 it could possibly be my last computer and I want it to last)
My question is…is the 6-core CPU complete overkill for running Unity? Can Unity take advantage of all those cores? Or should I save $1000 and go with the 4-core model.
I don’t think it makes much sense to spend an extra $1000 now to “future proof” unless you know what specific benefits you’re looking for. Consider how much more mileage you might get out of that same $1000 if you spend it to upgrade the cheaper of the two machines a year or two in the future. Then consider what practical benefit spending that $1000 now will get you. Make a decision based on those things. (I don’t know your use case, could go either way.)
If you’re doing stuff where a beefier CPU will save you time or energy or effort then it’s probably a $1000 well spent. Otherwise, I’d probably keep it in my pocket and use it to make a more significant improvement later.
You want the best single-core speed you can get, unless you use apps that heavily make use of multiple cores (rendering raytraced 4K frames in a 3D app, for example).
I have a 4790K in my dev machine at home. My dev machine at the office is a little older. It has a 3930K, which is a 6 core 3.2 GHz cpu.
The additional cores help if you are doing a lot of multitasking. I do more than just Unity development and I often have multiple VMs and active SQL Server instances running.
But for game development with Unity, @Eric5h5 is 100% correct. Single core speed is the most important factor right now.
According to Passmark, the 4790K is still the cpu with the highest single thread performance so I think that’s your best option.
Unity is not yet optimized to take advantage of all the available threads in a multicore cpu. By the time it is, 16 and 32 core cpus will likely be standard so there’s no point in wasting money on a 6 core cpu today if you don’t have other software that can use it now.
Beyond that, I would recommend spending $ to max out your RAM. I recently upgraded my home dev PC from 8GB to 32GB RAM and I’m just kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Everything is so much faster. Buy the most amount of RAM at the highest speed available that you can afford. You won’t regret it.
Also, if you can run Unity (and store your projects) on a different physical hard drive from Windows, that will help keep things running quickly too.
Lastly, I recently installed SuperCache and it’s amazing. Between my C and D drive I have 12GB dedicated to a RAM cache and it makes a big difference. Loading large projects is much faster and my SVN client is also able to scan large folder trees for new and updated files much faster than before.
One thing to always consider is your target platform… you can develop a game all nice a fast on a fast pc, but if your game is being released on a slower platform - or even on a slower or more commonplace pc spec, then you have to scale back on what your game can do. So there’s a difference between it speeding up your development and it speeding up the game itself.
I say not much point going beyond the 4/8-hyperthreaded at the moment. Most software is still trying to come out of the single-core dark-ages.
Definitely go for single core speed. You get the answer quickly yourself when looking at the cpu utilization during bakes or imports. Only some phases are fully parallel and profit from all the cores.
And I’d always go for k class chips as you can easily overclock them. I added 30% to mine bringing it from 3.7 to a nice 4.2ghz without instabilities.
Putting caches and project onto ssds is also a must in my eyes.
It also depends on whether you want to overclock and what other apps you’re running. The 5960x is the Extreme version of the chip which is why it’s so much more expensive. Me personally, I like to have more cores but also good speed because my desktop doubles as a Plex server and may be transcoding multiple video streams while I’m working. I also like to have multiple applications like Unity, Blender, Substance Painter / Designer and Visual Studio all open at once. More cores give you benefits with applications that use multithreading heavily but also when using multiple simultaneous applications.
I opted for the i7-5930K myself. It’s 6 Core with each core running at 3.5 Ghz but I OC’d it to 4.6 Ghz stable. I have since undone my OC and went back to the stock 3.5 GHz speed as it runs plenty fast for everything that I’m doing.
@TokyoDan Pick several things you do in a month that you don’t need to. Entertainment budget, desert budget, etc. How much money would the difference be until the upgrade is a no brainer? Example…
If it’s $500, then reduce your bi-weekly expenditure by $250 or your monthly expenditure by $500. Then paying the $1000 actually only made a difference of $500 in what you were planning to spend between paychecks.
Or if you make a decent amount of money, screw it, how long is it going to take for you to make back that $1000? Are you going to need it to balance your budget? Try putting a budget together in which you are $1,000 less. If the budget works out, you can consider that $1,000 already gone and use it for whatever you like.
The above two methods are how I justified spending money on video games while in highschool
