I am planning to upgrade some hardware parts on my PC soon and I have no idea what CPU should I buy....

 

Currently have Intel i5 -6500 4 cores 3.2 ghz and geforce gtx 1070 ti with 16 gb ram .

 

What cpu should I buy ? heard about ryzen.... but people say intel is better ? I did some google-ing and it seems this 10 year old game needs a nasa computer to run properly ?

 

Looking forward to your helpful tips. Thanks

The key is that the CPU must be fast in low thread-count code. The CPU/GPU balance in SWTOR is off, meaning that it requires more CPU performance than other games do. At the same time, adding more and more cores won't help it, because it doesn't run many threads in parallel.

 

So, historically, Intel had fewer-but-faster cores and AMD had more-but-slower cores, which favours Intels, but the newest Ryzens are catching up.

 

And don't forget that a CPU upgrade will almost certainly require a RAM and motherboard upgrade at the same time.

 

Final note: I ran SWTOR from March 2013 to the first week of 2018 on an i5 750 (2.8 GHz four single-thread cores) with an NVidia GT430. I couldn't set the graphics much above medium, and had to turn off shadows, but consistently got 15-25 frames per second, which was more than enough to play FPs, 8-man Ops and Warzones.

I always favored intel, but since they have refused to patch their exploit, my next processor will be AMD.

Currently have Intel i5 -6500 4 cores 3.2 ghz and geforce gtx 1070 ti with 16 gb ram .

 

What cpu should I buy ? heard about ryzen.... but people say intel is better ?

I currently run an Intel i5-6600**. As soon as I resolve some r/l issues I plan to upgrade to a newer Ryzen CPU.

SWTOR is CPU bound and what works best is high clock speed and high IPC (Instructions Per Clock-cycle). The older AMD CPUs, such as the FX series, sucked compared to Intel, but the new Ryzens have basically caught up. The very fastest Intel CPUs such as the i9-9900K are still the best by a small margin, but they're no longer faster enough to offset their price.

 

Since SWTOR only uses, at most, 2 threads/cores, multiple cores are not important to SWTOR, and it can run fine on even a 2 core CPU. But, of course for future proofing, more cores would be better, so I intend to get at least 6 cores, maybe more, depending upon the best out-of-box clock rate and IPC.

 

You current GTX-1070 is more than enough to handle SWTOR, and most other games at 1920x1080, so there's not much need to upgrade it unless you just want to. (I'm currently running an older AMD R9 390 which works as both a graphics card and a space heater. 😏 )

 

** The i5-6600 works well enough in most PvE, but it turn into a slide show in any 16 player content, and even in 8 player OPs the fps drops significantly, but it's still playable.

Yeah, what others have said.

 

You need high 4.0+ ghz, but not many cores. Maybe an i3-9350KF ($180-ish). It is the latest architecture gen 9 coffee lake, has 4 cores, and operates at 4.0 ghz but throttles up to 4.6 turbo frequency. The only downside is DDR4-2400, so if you were planning on DDR4-3000+, you would need to go with an i5-9600K, but it has more cores and slightly slower frequency (3.7 ghz, 4.6 turbo) and costs $220-ish.

 

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/191126/intel-core-i3-9350kf-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html

 

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/186606/intel-core-i3-9350k-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html

Edited January 27, 2020 by Rion_Starkiller