Need advice on new PC for shadowlands

yea, those are your 1% and looking at STEAM hardware survey there is obviously a sharp cut off once you start getting past $400 (at launch) GPUs.

agreed

yeah, if you are willing to dish out that kind of cash for the GPU you are obviously willing to dish out serious cash for the CPU as well.

Still the 10600k @ 5.1ghz is close to the top of Tom’s best gaming CPU list. I would say for most 3090 level buyers they are looking at 4k gaming at which point you are GPU bound and 10600k, 10900k, 8700k, 9700k, Ryzen 3800XT, 3950X, etc., etc., will make little real world difference in FPS in most games. (watch the one guy with a 1080p 360hz monitor come running in screaming I got the 3090 and i’m not gaming at 4k!!!)

FYI, catch the Watch Dog Legion benchmarks reviews? Brings most GPUs to a crawl at Ultra 1080p yet with a 2080ti, 2c/4t CPU (granted 5ghz) is giving you 64FPS avg and 43FPS min during the benchmark, gameplay should be around 15-20% less FPS.

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CPU needs depend on the game/settings.

Troy at max settings kills brings a 3950X (85fps) and 9900K (64fps) to their knees with full grass:
https://www.computerbase.de/2020-08/troy-a-total-war-saga-benchmark-test/2/

World of Warcraft uses more than 4 cores. In the test below WoW uses less than 4 threads most of the time. In a few occasions WoW uses over 20 threads in DX12 at 4K.

https://youtu.be/2GzNZcFF35A?t=551

All depends on what you want/play.

I’ve had my task manager open during WoW and I’ll see one core maxed out and the rest bouncing around between idle and 15-20% max - I don’t think the game generally uses them for anything really meaningful. Not during the content I’ve done I guess anyway.

DX12 I did see some decent uplift but it wasn’t like Vulkan levels.

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Task manager is not a reliable tool for in depth analysis. Something like mpstat would be much better.

Never tried it - I wonder how much overhead my usual stuff takes up during gaming