MSI GeForce GTX 770 Lightning Tested in SLI

[Wesley]

But the difference of fps on a dual core and a quad core with games making use of the 4 or more cores would be noticeable so why don't they do benchmarks showing top end dual core and top end 4+ core so that the different segment of buyers can see

Take any CPU-intensive game benchmark of the Core i5-3330 or the i5-3470. The Core i3-3225 can reach the same high-end framerates thanks to Hyper-threading, but when the game becomes very taxing and requires more physical cores, your framerate just about drops in half and it acts like a regular dual-core. Dual-cores are becoming a rarity in today's world. AMD only makes two dual-core chips, the rest starts from four cores and scales up.

Intel pretty much bets its entire budget line on dual-cores with strong single-thread performance, but when the crap hits the fan the A8-5600K is still running smoothly, whereas the equally priced i3-3220 will hiccup a bit until it recovers in time for the next intensive scene/battle. That's why Tom's Hardware changed their entry-level recommendations from Intel's Celeron and Pentium chips to a three year-old Athlon X4 and the Phenom II X4 945.

Ideally, no-one should really settle for a dual-core without Hyper-threading these days, its just not worth it. I can understand doing it for budget reasons, but games are really beginning to leave single-thread performance behind in favour of parallelism. That's also why you don't see many benchmarks on it. I mean, Tom's did a Intel performance test comparing chips from the last few generations and the dual-cores, even the Core 2 E8400 (such a nice chip,too), does take an arrow to the knee in games like Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3.

At least League of Legends is playable on older, low-end hardware.

Its so awesome to have a full on tech know it all here now
Makes me feel so happy, there was a time when this part of the forum was pretty much dead, apart from a few regulars and a odd noob here and there. Now its pumping.

Heh, thanks. I know what a dead tech section is like, its never a nice thing to watch.

I still maintain your better off sticking to a 7970 or GTX680 and if it came down to a choice between those two I would have to recommend the 7970 over the GTX680.

I'd recommend the HD7970 as well. Both the bundle and the performance is better than the GTX680 and the Metro: Last Light bundle. Nvidia doesn't really care because Kepler is earning them so much profit, funny enough.