 We always want faster and more powerful components, and these days people are starting to focus on other things as well, like power consumption and thermal output. But what about the age-old how many cores do I need for modern gaming question? Has the landscape changed or is it still quad cores for life like it was for pretty much a long time? What about the Pentium G3258 dual core that made a big splash a while back? Is that processor's blazing fast overclock speeds and affordable price point viable in today's market? Stay tuned to find out and stay subscribed for Linus Tech Tips for more awesome technology videos. The Cooler Master Novatouch TKL utilizes genuine Topar hybrid capacitive switches and is now available at a more affordable price. Click now to learn more. The test bench we use to get our numbers is rocking an Intel 5960X overclocked just a bit to 3.2 GHz with 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM running at 3000 MHz. It's also sporting a WinForce GTX 980 from Gigabyte running at stock, and we went a little bit crazy and started disabling cores and hyperthreading and to simulate various CPUs that are available for purchase today. For testing we chose to use a dual core without hyperthreading, dual core with hyperthreading, quad core without hyperthreading, quad core with hyperthreading, hex core with hyperthreading, and octa core with hyperthreading to round out our test suite. Alright, now for the meat and potatoes. We chose a few new games for our tests, so we'll start with those ones first. And first on the chopping block is Cities Skylines. To benchmark cities we downloaded the Los Santos map from GTA 5 made by Grockefeller on the Steam Workshop, and we chose a section of the town called South Los Santos with mixed traffic and building density to push the test bench quite a bit. We maxed out the graphics and zoomed in almost all the way and then started to record. Cities Skylines likes its CPU cores but only to a certain point. Dual cores seemed to struggle a bit, more than the rest of them at least, which wasn't too surprising, but where it got interesting was at the 8 core level. Cities ran a lot more poorly than actually lower levels and had very noticeable stuttering throughout all of our testing. A reminder however is we did run our tests shortly after the game came out, so optimizations might be not be made yet and might be made in the future and could very drastically change things over time. Next up we have Dying Light. We decided to run it at both 1080p and 4k after we saw the 1080p results to see if we could separate the numbers a bit more, as the only outlier was really the dual core. How we ran the benchmark for Dying Light was relatively straightforward. In the main town close to the tower there's a really long overpass. Near the start of that is a bus which is near the opening to the tunnel anyways. Just run down the overpass and loop back around while zigzagging through burning cars and be undead. We ran our tests after the developers have released several patches and optimizations and even at absolutely cranked settings not much of a difference really occurs at the higher end configurations with only the dual core and dual core with hyperthreading configurations suffering a bit of a performance hit. Our last newcomer to the game suite but not our last benchmark is Total War Attila. For this game we set the appropriate graphic settings which I decided was apparently freaking all of them and then selected the Suizans historical battle? Suizans? Swazans? I don't know and clashed the armies together in one giant ball without speeding it up. We ended up running the benchmark at every quality preset as you just saw to see if we could churn different results out of the game and it turns out Total War Attila is quite the powerhouse throwing more cores that it does indeed give a bit more of a performance jump over a dual core setup however the amount is oddly very negligible at lower presets. I will note that this game isn't the constant fps of the game these numbers are only from intense combat sections so it would run way better when not staring directly into combat. Where the twist comes in is at the maximum performance preset. The numbers are just ridiculous for this test and make no sense but average frame rates are super high and there is no drastic stuttering so if you're worried about if your machine can run this game put it on maximum performance settings and it should be extremely easy for you to do even with some older slower processors. Now that all the new games are done let's take a break for some oldies but goodies. The first being Tomb Raider. I know this game dates back all the way to 2013 but it's a very reliable benchmark in terms of gpu scaling so we decided to include it as it's in lots of our test suites. Like Dying Light we ran Tomb Raider in both 1080p and 4k and the results were pretty funny to be honest. It doesn't seem to matter what arrangement of cores you have the game will run perfectly equal like freakishly equal even at 4k. I think in the future we will leave this game for gpu tests only. Our final game is Far Cry 4. This game is a bit of a shit show and that's why we saved it for last. Performance is essentially the same across four six and eight core settings regardless of hyperthreading but as soon as you drop down to dual cores hyperthreading or not the game flat out refuses to boot at all. This is because Ubisoft locked out all users that have dual cores from launching the freaking game. There is a fix floating around that could potentially get it running but it's a hassle and most mention of it has been pulled down by Ubisoft anyways. Those of you with older dual cores or the Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition beware as this could be a pretty big issue for you. Honestly the most disappointing thing about this issue is that from the looks of it it's easier to fix for pirates than it is for real paying users which is highly disappointing yet not at all surprising. All right I guess that brings us tidally to the conclusion of this video which is having more cores is nice and may help with some things like video rendering or game streaming or whatever else but you don't need more than a quad core for modern gaming and you would be mostly fine with a quick dual core even but what's your sweet spot? Let me know in the comments down below or on the forum. I know I like my higher core count processors because I tend to be doing a billion things at once on my computer including running virtual machines, streaming games and more. Would you guys be interested in a cores for gaming style video where we rerun these tests while doing other things on the computer as well like possibly streaming or just a whole bunch of tabs in a browser? Let me know. Speaking of performance our friends over at Chiro have an awesome high capacity battery bank that they want us to show off today. It's their Power Plus 3 13400 mAh battery bank which features a nice rounded design and a slightly sticky texture which allows you to maintain a solid grip on it despite the rounded edges. Like other Chiro products all of the battery cells used inside are made by Panasonic in Japan so you can count on their high quality durability and safety and of course that also facilitates the great capacity in such a compact size. This battery bank is currently available for $39.99 on Amazon and if you purchase one of the first 3,000 units you will actually receive a 60 centimeter version of Chiro's lightning and micro USB dual connector cable. So if you're interested in a high capacity battery bank with a very manageable form factor you should definitely check out the Chiro Power Plus 3 13400 mAh in the link in the video description down below. All right guys while you're here watching this video like, dislike, favorite, subscribe, share, comment, do anything else that has a button around here somewhere that's probably not a bad idea and then jump over to the forum but before you jump over the forum check the link in the video description below to buy a cool shirt like this one. Yes I did it! Once you're over on the forum click the support us link that'll show you how to do stuff like change your Amazon affiliate code to ours so we get a small kickback and you can become a contributor on the forum to get that awesome cool bronze, silver, gold badge and maybe some other stuff. Anyways thank you guys for watching I'll see you next time.