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I'm in the planning stages for a machine on which i want to have two seats: one as a 1080p home theatre/gaming rig, and the other as a general purpose seat for web browsing, youtube watching, programming, etc.

My question is how powerful of a CPU do i really need to play games on one seat while someone else is doing whatever on the other?

Only the first seat will have a GPU (probably something along the lines of a gtx960). The second seat won't need one.

I imagine the most intensive task i will be running on the second seat is some digital painting, or perhaps compiling some small programs.

I'd like to specify that i'm not looking for a specific reccomendation, just general specifications like 'you might want at least n amount of cores/threads' or 'more than x ghz clock speed because...'

user151768
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  • That totally depends on what games you want to play, and how resource hungry they are. Web browsing/youtube watching/programming/compiling should be fine with one core on a reasonable recent CPU, so you have whatever is left for the game seat. Whatever you do, make sure you have enough RAM, and big enough CPU caches. Consider a fixed assignment of 1 core to the general purpose seat, and the rest to the gaming seat etc. – dirkt Dec 09 '16 at 08:53

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Most-likely the computational intensive task is web browsing since javascript can at times run away. I'd look at core i3, core i5 with as much memory as you an buy, the browser will consume what it can.

Ed Neville
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  • Would a core i3/lower end i5 really be enough for 1080p gaming and web browsing? – user151768 Dec 09 '16 at 08:15
  • Not enough information to answer that in any specify depth. Depends on the games. I only play 'glchess' for example and you can browse the web at whatever resolution you like. Down to individual expectations. You wont get core i7 performance from a core i3. – Ed Neville Dec 10 '16 at 11:36
  • Generally the video card defines if you can do "high quality" gaming - as it does the heavy lifting. Gaming can be very, very system intensive - outside server class machines, gaming machines are considered very high end and commonly push the boundaries, so for an intense game, an i3 may not be enough, however for slightly older games, or games which offload most of the work to the GPU, it should be fine. Web browsing need not take much CPU resource. Searching CPUBenchmark.com for the CPU's of interest will give a general overview of relative performing CPU's... – davidgo Dec 11 '16 at 02:20
  • A low end i3 or i5 CPU may perform as well as, or better then a higher end one - often higher end CPU's are optimised for things other then speed - like mobile CPU's are optimised for performance per watt, and can be both slower and more expensive then their regular iX counterpart. – davidgo Dec 11 '16 at 02:21
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No one can accurately answer this question because it depends on what programs are being used and what tasks are being done. Where tasks can use optimised code (eg accellerated video playback using built in GPU, or encryption using AES instructions built onto the CPU), very little CPU is required.

Similarly with web browsing, you can get lightweight sites and heavyweight sites, and some of it depends on how many tabs the browser is using.

Further, not all CPU's in the same class are created equal.

One thing to consider is how many threads a system can use - it may be beneficial to get a CPU with more threads but slightly slower cores, rather then fewer fast cores, because you know more more things are going to run simultaneously.

You also want to pay attention to RAM and disk - for most of what you have described (with the possible exception of gaming and maybe compiling code), memory and especially disk - ie get SSD's - is more important then CPU.

davidgo
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  • I understand that no one can give me an exact 'buy this' kind of answer. I'm more looking for some guidance in the right direction. Why would disk speed be more important? – user151768 Dec 09 '16 at 08:24
  • Because hard disks are generally the bottleneck, on computers, and this problem is amplified when multiple things are reading/ writing to the disk at the same time - the system grinds to near a halt whenever it is waiting on the disk - if its only a small file its not noticeable, but if its a larger file it becomes very noticeable. While you might expect a delay while opening a game, the person doing we browsing is not expecting the delay. Using SSD eliminates this issue. Your case is not common, but if you research SSD's in VM servers, it should provide you with some insites. – davidgo Dec 09 '16 at 09:29