Thanks for the advice on the cooler. As I was indeed planning on using the stock one. But obviously overclocking may well be important for SCII.
Yeah, not so sure I’d want to pay that much for, purely for SCII. I certainly want 1v1 matches to be smooth, even in late game, though.
It freaks me out hearing that some people can run as low as 1FPS with a 2nd gen processor.
Well, the thing is, for 1v1 this game runs on crap hardware with no problem. But in larger, more complex situations like 3v3 late game or Co-op is really the situation that shows how SC2’s engine hasn’t aged well. The optimization is very poor if not non-existent on newer hardware and it doesn’t scale beyond 2 cores. For a more generalized build recommendation you can go to r/buildapc subreddit for your build.
Here’s a question. If I go for the r5 3600 over the 3600x, but have to buy another cooler for it (it comes with one stock in the pack) because I choose to overclock it, is it saving me anything?
I have Core i7 8700K and it is doing great with SC2 + streaming. Also it is much cheaper nowadays. Try it. Have a video of its performance if you like: h ttps://youtu.be/RWccF6935fc
Go for the 3600. You can manually overclock it if you really want to the same speed as a 3600x. It will save you $.
Ryzen 5 3600x is “good enough” for most gaming along the lines of how i5 systems were around 8 years ago; Ryzen 7 3700x is probably better if you’re streaming because you can use the extra virtual cores, but then you’re also competing against the Intel i7 9700k which does like 5-20% better in single threaded. I personally say go for the Ryzen so you can use the x570 boards to use the new pcie 4 nvme ssds at full speed. They’re absurdly fast.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
Scroll down until you find ones in your budget range. The highest rated one below your budget will be the best performing CPU you can afford with your budget. It is also good to browse a bit, as there is often hardware with similar performance but at a much better price. AMD CPUs for example will generally perform much better for the cost than Intel.
If you live in the US, wait until black friday or cyber monday as you can get really good deals (often as much as half price). Browse the deals on places like Newegg and compare them to this list.