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Originally Answered: Is a core i5 good for hard core gaming?
This is an interesting question.
When you say “hardcore gaming” we can be talking about a teenager (13–15) who just plays games a lot and considers it “hardcore”, which is the impression I’m getting, another case can also be a new streamer who wants to get a new PC to stream the latest and greatest games all day. This is why we’ll be talking about these two types of users.
Which i5?
Simply saying i5 is not possible. But I’m going to assume you’re talking about i5s in the 180–200$ price-range as they seem to be the most common ones. (i5 7500–7600k.). If you’re looking at older CPUs you need to specify which one, but generally speaking: 6th and 7th gen is very similar in terms of price AND performance, the older generations tend to run on DDR3, have less features etc. And are sometimes cheaper, but they won’t be THAT far behind if we’re not looking at the 3rd gen and lower, which is starting to show its age.
As a person who plays a lot:
If you’re just a person who plays a lot of games then an i5 should do the job for 60Hz gaming, but in newer games you’ll start to experience times when your CPU simply can’t keep up if you want to play games at say: 144Hz. In most of these games having extra CPU cores or hyper-threading (such as in an i7) will definitely help! I will also assume you’re playing games at 1080p (for the final paragraph)
As a person who streams:
If you’re the type of person who streams, I’m guessing your main goal is a stable 60FPS while streaming.
For this, an i5 won’t cut it in AAA titles. For this I’d recommend the r5 1600 as it’s prices in a similar price to the i5 7600k and is WAY better for streaming compared to many i7s as seen here
As a person who video edits:
For video editing I’d go with a ryzen r5 1600 simply due to how good they are for video encoding, editing etc. As we can see here.
We can clearly see the r5 1600 destroying the i5 here, which is at a similar price, it should also be noted that this CPU does a better job than my i7 6850k at times as well (when comparing numbers), which is something I’d definitely consider.
It’s not all about the CPU
Even if you buy an i9 extreme CPU, you won’t get anything from it unless you have the GPU to back it up. For a constant 60FPS I’d say a GTX 1060 would be a minimum if you want to play games maxed out, and if you stream: A GTX 1070 would be a better choice.
8GB is enough if you’re just playing games, but if you use programs like Davinci Resolve for editing etc. You should be looking at 16GBs of RAM, same goes for streaming, while 8GB is “enough” games are making use of more RAM now than ever before, and this will just keep on increasing, so it’s always nice to have a bit more than “enough” these days, just to be sure!
Remember to have a good enough PSU to run all of this.
Remember to have a decent HDD/SSD as well.
Remember to have a compatible motherboard to the CPU.
A summary
Intel core I5s are enough if you just game for 60Hz, but for anything above I’d be looking at the i7 lineup.
If you stream: an r5 1600 would get the job done MUCH better.
If you video edit: the r5 1600 is a better choice once more.
Remember to have good enough hardware so nothing gets bottle-necked.
That should be it, I hope this was an informative read!
Feedback is always nice, please do tell me if I slipped up somewhere!
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