 In a recent video, you guys called me out pretty hard. It was the one here about the performance of CPUs with varying numbers of processing cores when gaming at the same time as performing other intensive tasks in the background, and many viewers were displeased with the methodology that I used to obtain my numbers. Now, of course, I didn't dive headlong into hours of testing without some kind of hair-brain theory about how it would work, so I was pretty sure my numbers were fine, but one should never be afraid to question one's own assumptions, and whatever the result is, whether I was right or the critics were right, I'm here to share them with you. Just like soon, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the upgradability of the iMac 27-inch Retina 5K all-in-one PC that I've been using as my daily driver. But first, the intro. Ensure swift victory with Corsair's highly responsive, lightweight gaming mouse, the Saber RGB. Click now to learn more. So, I guess I should explain what people were so upset about before I get too much further into this. Because the idea behind that video was to find an extreme workload scenario first, then see how it affected a variety of processor configurations, a fair amount of time was actually spent developing the benchmark scenario that I'd be using in order to ensure that it put enough load on my configuration to let the more powerful CPUs stretch their legs, while not putting so much load on my configuration that absolutely everything choked to the point where it didn't function. So I decided that instead of removing the cooler, swapping out the chip, reapplying thermal compound, then putting a new motherboard on the test bench each and every time I needed to see how my stress test was going to affect another CPU class, I was going to simply use the BIOS of the motherboard that I was using to take my best processor, an i7-5960X Extreme Edition, and limit it artificially to the specs of the other contenders in the test. Now hold on a minute Linus, can you do that? In the vast majority of cases, no, no you can't. I had a lot of people ask why I didn't include AMD processors in that test, and this is actually the answer. Since the point of the video was more cores versus fewer cores, not red team versus blue team anyway, there was no real point, and it would be a lot more work because I'd have to swap benches and deal with drivers in between runs every time. Alright Linus, so then in what situation would this artificial CPU faking theoretically work? If every CPU you're simulating was designed with the same processor architecture, so in this case everything was Haswell based, and has the same non-adjustable specs, so cache, memory technology support, motherboard socket, etc., and differs only in terms of the parameters that we can change, frequency multiplier, hyper-threading support, turbo boost ratios, etc., then they should perform identically. Now I did fudge things a little bit further than that and simulated CPUs with completely different RAM support, DDR3 versus DDR4, and different cache amounts, but none of my workloads were hyper cache dependent to my knowledge, and I had already found DDR3 versus DDR4 performance to be pretty much a non-factor outside of synthetic benchmarks and the apples to apples comparison I had done previously, which you can see here, so I went for it. And here we are, after all that preamble, ready to test whether my methodology was okay or not. Cue the charts and graphs! I ran a variety of benchmarks on both the Core i7-5960X that had memory channels, cores, hyper-threading, and turbo boost adjusted to simulate a Core i5-4670K and a Pentium G3258, and then I ran the same benchmarks on the actual chips themselves, with the only differences in theory being DDR3-1866 RAM versus DDR4-2400 RAM and the on-die cache sizes, and honestly, I was both pleased with my theory, because it's been somewhat validated now, because the results really are very close for the 4670K, and also a little disappointed, because I can see that as cache sizes really fall off a cliff, this theory cannot be applied. Our simulated G3258 outperformed our real one by a fairly significant margin in some benchmarks. So there you have it. I still stand behind the way I ran those tests, because the time savings was definitely worth the margin of error that was introduced by doing it that way, especially considering that the point of the video wasn't the exact models of the CPUs, but rather their number of cores and approximate multitasking proficiency, but I see that if I was looking for a way to save time on our normal CPU performance reviews, this obviously isn't it, and we'll have to continue doing board and chip swaps moving forward, especially if we want to measure things that would be different, no matter how close you get the specs due to Intel's binning process, like heat output and power consumption. Oh, and speaking of Intel CPUs, today's episode sponsor, Gigabyte, wanted us to show off their new P35v3 gaming notebook, an extremely slim gaming notebook, which is powered by a 4th Gen Intel Core i7 Mobile Quad Core processor. This baby features an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M, a 15.6-inch 1080p monitor. The panel type may vary by region. It can support up to 16 gigs of DDR3 memory, up to 512 gig SSD, and up to 2 terabytes of hard drive storage. One of the other pretty amazing things about this bad boy is that it's only 20.9 millimeters thick, and weighs in at 2.2 kilograms. It's extremely easy to transport, and with its rear exhaust, your hands should remain cool and comfortable even during a heavy gaming session. So, if you're in the market for a new gaming laptop... Oh yeah, did I mention it actually has an optical drive? They squeezed an optical drive into this thing. Sorry, sorry, if you're in the market for a new gaming laptop, maybe you're getting, you know, way more Christmas money than I ever did, or perhaps you need to pick up a new notebook before the new school semester starts, check out the Gigabyte P35v3 at the link in the video description if you want something that can run all the latest games as well. So thank you guys for watching this video, like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know if your feelings were just more complicated than this. As always, don't forget to check out the link in the video description to support us, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, you can give us a month of contribution, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so whenever you buy new notebooks, CPUs, fans, dry erase markers, or whatever else the case may be, we get a small kickback. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.