I just looked at this Passmark chart:  https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

By my calculations my 3930K at 4.42Ghz versus 7700K at 4.5Ghz gets a whopping increase of 8% in that single-core benchmark.  And the 3930K has been on a Noctua air cooler.  This is very discouraging as my 3930K box just died, and I'm thinking it's the ASUS P979X WS mainboard w/ its beep code saying, 'Hardware Component Failure'.   The 3930K could still be working!  This leaves me wondering if I shouldn't pick up a new ASUS P979X WS which is available on eBay right now and maybe this means I can resus the entire system w/ minimal work, no software reloading, etc.  Very attractive.  I could continue to use my 32Gb of DDR3 at 2400mHz and my CPU, versus upgrading to a new mobo/ram/cpu.  The problem of course is that I really don't know which 'Hardware Component Failed', but I'm assuming since there were beep codes at all (one continuous f/b 4 short beeps) it must be the mainboard.

I was all set to upgrade to 7900X or some comparable 6+ core solution, but this single core benchmark is exceedingly underwhelming, especially considering I will need to change cooling solutions to water which I've never done before and no nothing about. 

Am I reading all of this correctly?

18 minutes ago, Noel said:

I just looked at this Passmark chart:  https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

By my calculations my 3930K at 4.42Ghz versus 7700K at 4.5Ghz gets a whopping increase of 8% in that single-core benchmark.  And the 3930K has been on a Noctua air cooler.  This is very discouraging as my 3930K box just died, and I'm thinking it's the ASUS P979X WS mainboard w/ its beep code saying, 'Hardware Component Failure'.   The 3930K could still be working!  This leaves me wondering if I shouldn't pick up a new ASUS P979X WS which is available on eBay right now and maybe this means I can resus the entire system w/ minimal work, no software reloading, etc.  Very attractive.  I could continue to use my 32Gb of DDR3 at 2400mHz and my CPU, versus upgrading to a new mobo/ram/cpu.  The problem of course is that I really don't know which 'Hardware Component Failed', but I'm assuming since there were beep codes at all (one continuous f/b 4 short beeps) it must be the mainboard.

I was all set to upgrade to 7900X or some comparable 6+ core solution, but this single core benchmark is exceedingly underwhelming, especially considering I will need to change cooling solutions to water which I've never done before and no nothing about. 

Am I reading all of this correctly?

I guess not. 7700K is newer tech and faster than 6700K. And I am dead certain the 6700K is faster than a 3rd gen ivy bridger

2 hours ago, Piotr007 said:

I guess not. 7700K is newer tech and faster than 6700K. And I am dead certain the 6700K is faster than a 3rd gen ivy bridger

"Faster" applies when it's 0.5% faster, right?  Sure.  Actually 3930K is 2nd generation I-7.   Of course that's only Passmark.  If someone has objective evidence that this 8% is woefully under representing single core performance AS IT APPLIES to P3D, please direct me to a source.    Everyone can agree CPU performance as it related to P3D is LARGELY, not completely, single-core performance dependent.  So that matters a whole lot!  It appears i9-7900X and I7-7700 are neck and neck for single core.  I do want to have at least 6 cores as I am a staunch believer in it having enjoyed 3930K for these 4.3y and performance has been real good.

9 minutes ago, Noel said:

"Faster" applies when it's 0.5% faster, right?  Sure.  Actually 3930K is 2nd generation I-7.   Of course that's only Passmark.  If someone has objective evidence that this 8% is woefully under representing single core performance AS IT APPLIES to P3D, please direct me to a source.    Everyone can agree CPU performance as it related to P3D is LARGELY, not completely, single-core performance dependent.  So that matters a whole lot!  It appears i9-7900X and I7-7700 are neck and neck for single core.  I do want to have at least 6 cores as I am a staunch believer in it having enjoyed 3930K for these 4.3y and performance has been real good.

I am interested in a hexa-core as well. Do you think P3D V4 will benefit more from 6 cores than from 4? I am using i7 6700K now at 4.5 ghz. I guess this is easily achieveable with a 6-core, to get 4,5ghz speed?

The downside is, more cores is more heat generated at OC so less headspace to overclock. That makes a 6-core a useless upgrade if it is true...

 

I should also mention that with ORBX, FSDT KJFK, Ultimate Live traffic, ASP4, I get 100% CPU usage on all 4 cores at moments. Causes many lag graces when flying near New York.

My sense all along has been, Gee, I have an almost 5 y/o 2nd generation i7 based system and I think from what I read here I was getting very decent performance.  I know my GPU is a major bottleneck to being able to do more GPU intensive slider settings (Lighting group predominantly) but I have to think my CPU is still right in there w/ current offerings--only 8% worse if this one benchmark applies to P3D.  It's unfortunate that single-core performance has improve so little in nearly 5 years.   This being said, I do believe P3D benefits enough from multicore to have at least 6 cores if not more, provided you don't lose much single-core performance to get there.  

With SteveW's and GSalden's help I found the right affinity mask for my hexacore running HT enabled at 4.42Ghz, and performance is really excellent.  I do respect the performance ceiling by avoiding mixing too many complex attributes in a given flight plan.   So as a result I have liquid smooth stutter-free performance almost always.  I will benefit from a 1080Ti so eventually will go there.

I don't overclock and I am doing 7700 on air (no K). 

blaustern

 

 

You're comparing an older extreme chip to a newer mainstream chip with less cores and gimped memory bandwidth, hard to see how it all pans out but I've studied it hard and don't see that much more benefit unless you put that 7700k on water and get it to 5Ghz. P3D and FSX - clock speed is king.

There is now the new X299 platform coming from Intel too that looks like a better replacement for an X79 system than a mainstream Z270 chipset

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3930K/3647vs1487

1 hour ago, Slayer said:

You're comparing an older extreme chip to a newer mainstream chip with less cores and gimped memory bandwidth, hard to see how it all pans out but I've studied it hard and don't see that much more benefit unless you put that 7700k on water and get it to 5Ghz. P3D and FSX - clock speed is king.

Yes, I threw in i7-7700K only because it had almost identical single core perf as does i9-7900X and I will be looking at picking up either 7820X or 7900X.   If 7900X can sustain at least one core at 4.6Ghz or more I would set all other cores to something real low, like 3.6Ghz which I would imagine can easily manage peripheral processes and terrain texture loading.  Perhaps cooling needs can then easily be managed with a simpler AIO water cooler.

My system will benefit greatly by 1080Ti or Titan Xp as well.  I think it will be best to get one of these installed on day 1 because from what I see in benchmarks what I will see will largely be underwhelming without adding the new GPU, and I hate to spend this kind of $$ for underwhelming!

I believe I read the higher end chips can OC 2 cores now too, it will be interesting to see the impact on sims.

1 hour ago, lownslo said:

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3930K/3647vs1487

I'm not sure how they have set up this comparison.   If you look at their 'Peak Overclocked Bench' the 7700 is 29% faster than the 3930K.  But the average overclock submission for the 7700 was 5.15Ghz, whereas for the 3930K it was only 3.6Ghz.  My 3930K runs at 4.42Ghz, so the +29% increase in mixed single-core performance goes down to a grand total of +5.4% if you use those numbers.   As I say, I can't quite tell what they are comparing.  The first metric, 'Effective Speed' apparently was based on the stock speeds of the 7700 at 4.2Ghz, and the stock speed of the 3930K of 3.2Ghz (!!), so the +41% goes out the window big time.

I'm afraid progress CPU single-core performance has sadly come to near halt over the past 5 years which is why simulator developers should think out of the box enough to figure out how to better access all of this poorly tapped multicore potential.   

Given raw math performance the i7 39s are good, I'll upgrade my 3960x @4.1 when it goes pop.

Intel Core i7-3960X @ 3.30GHz = 12686, 12686 / 3.3 * 4.2 = 16145

Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz = 12027, 12027 / 3.2 * 4.2 = 15785

Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.20GHz = 12178, 12178 / 4.2 * 5.15 = 14932

Can the performance be extrapolated by way of frequency in this way? Yes, more or less, but the overall performance gains for recent hardware are through motherboard components and improvements to chipsets.

32 minutes ago, SteveW said:

...but the overall performance gains for recent hardware are through motherboard components and improvements to chipsets.

Plus the improved IPC of the newer CPU's can certainly be advantageous.  Only comparing clock per clock is simply not enough for a valid performance discussion.

Regards,

Greg

I wonder how much sim add-on developers work w/ LM to work out a way for those add-ons, or components of them, to be able to sync w/ P3D and run outside of P3D.  I understand Majestic Software's Dash 8 Q400 has some significant part of it running outside of P3D and that this helps account for its truly stellar performance.  Why doesn't PMDG do this, that is, if they don't already?   GSX seems to have the potential for a negative impact slight as it may be within P3D, so can it be made to run outside P3D's main thread?  Maybe it does already but it doesn't really behave like it at first glance.  So yes, since the constraint is the slow rate of improvement in single-core performance it seems obvious the place to spend effort is in multicore to the max.   

8 hours ago, lownslo said:

Plus the improved IPC of the newer CPU's can certainly be advantageous.  Only comparing clock per clock is simply not enough for a valid performance discussion.

Regards,

Greg

Absolutely, for example why a 3960x outperforms a 3930 at the same frequency.