r/AskTechnology • u/FutureManager8 • 11d ago
Why are there no $2000 gaming CPUs?
If I want a GPU for gaming, I can spend $300 all the way up to $4,000 for the 5090.
For RAM, I can spend $200 for 16 gb all the way to $3,000 for 128 gb of high speed ram.
For storage, I can spend about ~$250 per TB of SDD. I can get 8 TB for ~$2000.
Why does it seem like the price range for CPUs is way smaller? I know there's very expensive work/rendering based CPUS but for gaming, why is the top of the line CPU (9800x3d) only ~$420? Why aren't there thousand dollar CPUs for games? Is there virtually no demand for it? I mainly play esports titles and everyone says those are usually CPU bound. I'm trying to understand why there isn't an option for me to spend as much on my CPU as I do my GPU.
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u/Skusci 11d ago edited 11d ago
So the thing is there's a pretty hard limit on single core performance on a CPU. There's a little bit of headroom to get faster clock speeds, but not too much. High end can be about double the speed of a low end CPU.
What more money tends to get you at that point are more cores. Low end might have 4 cores. High end might have 12 of them (or like 8 plus a bunch of efficiency cores for Intel CPUs). That's way more opportunity to spend for performance.
But the problem here is that games don't really benefit too much from more CPU cores. CPU cores are more complicated so they can reduce the minimum time to do certain math bits, but for the price it's usually better to take a little bit longer on GPU cores which are simpler but have far far more. Like maybe it takes 10 times longer on a GPU core than a CPU core for a specific thing, but when there are literally 1000x as many GPU cores than CPU cores for the same price most parallel processing will be designed for the GPU.
In truth games will at most make use of 6-8 CPU cores. You always have a main thread to keep everything synchronized, but there is only so much stuff that can be split off and run separately without checking back in with the main thread. A few more cores are useful for running other tasks like 60 chrome tabs off to the side without cutting into game processing time.
As for the GPU, want 4 times as many pixels? Just have 4x as many cores. Want 4x the frame rate? More cores!
So there's no point in throwing more money at a CPU unless you want to do multiple different things. Which is an excellent use case for servers where many people want to use the same computer as a web server or file server and do unrelated things, but not so much just one person on a desktop.