I have an FX-8350 CPU clocked at 4.5GHz with a very minor voltage bump. Graphics card is a Gigabyte 7950 card (3GB) that I've bios flashed to 1GHz stable. I decided to try to figure out exactly how many cores this game likes with an AMD FX chip, and what effect, if any, using the '1 core per module' setting would have.
I run the game on a 1680x1050 monitor with the following quality settings:
Game Play Resolution: 100%
Image Quality: High
AA: Low (setting this any higher on just about any graphics card will completely cripple the game!)
V-sync: off
Texture Detail: High
Snow Detail: Medium
Physics: Medium (just realized this can be set to high with only a very marginal impact - ie. 2 FPS loss!)
Here are the results of the built-in benchmark - FPS:
With 4 cores enabled:
Min: 23.82
Max: 61.14
Avg: 40.81
With 6 cores enabled:
Min: 32.90
Max: 64.10
Avg: 46.59
With 8 cores enabled:
Min: 32.23
Max: 65.67
Max: 46.94
With 4 cores - 1 per module enabled:
Min: 31.78
Max: 66.07
Avg: 48.30
So, the results I obtained seem to indicate that with the AMD 7950 graphics card I have, at 1680x1050 resolution, and the game graphics settings I used, an AMD FX-6300 or FX-6350 chip clocked at 4.5GHz would give you virtually identical performance to my FX-8350 chip with all 8 cores clocked at 4.5GHz. In fact, the game will run every so slightly faster with only 4 cores enabled, using the 1 core-per-module setting on an 8 core FX CPU at that clock rate! This is quite fascinating, because it makes me wonder why the 4 core FX CPUs do so much worse than the 6 and 8 core FX CPUs? I know the FX-4350 is a two-module chip, but I would have thought there would be much less resource-sharing contention between the chips on the same module than is indicated by my results.
Finally, I just want to say that I think an FX-6300 or FX-6350 chip would be the best bang-for-the-buck chip for someone who is primarily looking to play COH2, and wants to keep their CPU budget as low as possible. I'm quite happy with my FX-8350, and essentially, a 6 core FX chip clocked to the same MHz (4.5GHz) will perform identically well in this game.
Now, if AMD will only release an R9 390(X) graphics card that will double the frame rates of the R9 290(X) cards in this game on my current platform, I will be all over that card!!
![:) :)](/images/Smileys/smile.gif)
Hope some of you find this information helpful!