Summary
- Multitasking on your PC is smoother with 8-core chips.
- Productivity applications benefit greatly from higher core counts.
- Demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 can now utilize more than 6 cores.
For the longest time, 6-core CPUs have been the sweet spot for PC builders, delivering ample performance in both gaming and productivity workloads. While multi-core applications can easily utilize any number of cores you throw at them, 6 cores are not what you'll call "too few". Moreover, games have rarely been able to take advantage of more than 6 cores. For the average user building a PC, it makes an awful lot of sense to buy only the best gaming CPUs with 6 cores.
But, as you already know, if you're a PC user, you aren't just gaming on it. And as PC users take advantage of all the computing power at their disposal for a variety of workloads, 8 cores are finally becoming useful, even for the average user. This is becoming true even in gaming scenarios, as more and more modern games begin to stress 8-core CPUs to their limit.
If you like running multiple applications in the background while uploading your latest stream and playing the next match in your favorite multiplayer game, it might be time to upgrade to an 8-core CPU.
3 Multitasking is a breeze
Don't bother closing applications
I've used 6-core CPUs for the longest time — until as recently as 2022. Rocking a 6-core Ryzen CPU in my previous build, I never faced any glaring issues with gaming. But, there was always a cardinal rule I had to follow — never touch the system when installing a game. Game installs used to bring my PC to a virtual crawl, and even browsing Chrome became less than ideal in those situations. And this was on a system with 16GB of RAM and an NVMe SSD.
When I made the switch to the 8-core Ryzen 7 5700X, it didn't take long for me to notice that I could now run multiple applications simultaneously without slowing down my system. I could happily watch YouTube while a game install was running in the background along with Wallpaper Engine and SignalRGB, plus a dozen other tabs open in several different browsers — all with various work and non-work content.
Windows Resource Monitor clearly showed that almost every single one of the 16 threads was regularly hitting 100% usage during the game install, while I switched between YouTube in one browser and an article draft in another. Hence, my current PC usage is able to make full use of the extra cores and threads I upgraded to. Multitasking becomes much less annoying and stressful when you don't need to worry about closing a few apps to open some more.
2 Productivity benefits are real
All the editing and rendering you want
Multi-core workloads like video editing, video encoding, 3D animation, and 3D rendering will happily utilize all the cores and threads available on your PC. While it's true that dedicated professionals and productivity users, in general, would prefer the best productivity CPUs with even higher core counts, an 8-core CPU would provide you with a great price-to-performance ratio.
If you regularly use applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Blender, you'll find that they're able to load all of the logical processors (threads) of your 8-core CPU sufficiently. Investing in an 8-core CPU starts to make more sense when you consider its benefits in such multi-core workloads.
Running the Blender 4.0 benchmark on my Ryzen 7 5700X showed all the threads being loaded to the maximum, meaning the benchmark was able to utilize all of the CPU horsepower available. While this wasn't surprising by itself, it goes to show that if you're even occasionally using any multi-core-heavy application, you should definitely consider switching to an 8-core CPU (or higher if your budget permits).
1 Heavy gaming gets a leg up
Yes, games use 8 cores now!
The majority of modern games might still be fine with 6 cores, but there are titles available that can make full use of the latest 8-core processors. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 can really stress an 8-core CPU to its limits in certain environments. As developers optimize games for 8-core CPUs more and more, both native titles as well as PC ports will continue to leverage 8 cores.
In my testing, Cyberpunk 2077 was able to sufficiently load all the threads, with the total CPU usage touching 90%. Plus, 11 of the 16 threads were loaded more than 90%. This clearly shows that 8 cores are far from "unnecessary" for certain heavy titles. We'll continue to see more AAA games utilize 8 cores. In fact, Alan Wake 2 is known to load 8 cores/16 threads and even higher core counts to a decent extent.
Even if you're building a PC solely for high-end gaming, you'll need high-end hardware to be ready for PC gaming in 2024. Whichever side of the Intel vs. AMD debate you stand on, this would include an 8-core processor.
The era of mainstream 8-core CPUs
I believe that 2024 will finally be the year that 8-core CPUs go mainstream. The average PC builder will begin to realize the productivity and multitasking benefits of higher-core-count CPUs and begin transitioning from 6-core chips. For approximately 40% higher investment in, say, a Ryzen 7 7700X compared to a Ryzen 5 7600, you can gain access to a higher performance class. This would be especially enticing for users who regularly use their systems for not just games but non-gaming applications too.