Thinking about upgrading CPU with one with lower single thread performance?

[BlazingAngels]

I have an i5-650 but am thinking about upgrading to a i7-860 in my Dell Studio XPS 8100. It has a higher overall Passmark score but a lower single thread performance score. I trying to increase video game performance to hold me over for another year or two with my new GTX 960 SSC card. For gaming, is single thread performance a better indicator of overall video game performance than the overall Passmark score? Thanks!

[David (PassMark)]

Older games were mostly single threaded. But I would think that nearly all new games would take advantage of 2 to 4 threads.

[BlazingAngels]

Thank you for your reply! I found this interesting website:

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-PassMark-single-thread-score/51

Here is the text for those who do not want to visit the webpage:

The PassMark Single Thread CPU benchmark, like all processor benchmarks attempts to estimate how quickly a processor is able to perform a wide variety of calculations. The test issues as series of complex instructions to the processor and times how long the processor takes to complete the tasks. The faster the processor is able to complete the tasks, the higher the benchmark score. The PassMark Single Thread CPU test only runs one stream of instructions rather than multiple parallel streams per core. The majority of consumer applications (MS World, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and most games) although multi threaded rarely utilize more than one thread at a time, so this test can be seen a a reasonable real world test for typical consumer workloads.

If a CPU is "rarely processing more than one thread at a time", is not single-thread performance more important, assuming, of course, that the processor is not overloaded with a bunch of non-gaming programs?

[David (PassMark)]

It depends on what software you are running.

If you are only browsing the web, using MS Word and doing E-mail, then CPU performance isn't actually all that important. Any old CPU can do these tasks. In fact hard drive speed and your internet connection speed are more important for these basic tasks.