Choosing a CPU for a multi-seat setup

Question

I'm in the planning stages for a machine on which i want to have two seats: one as a 1080p home theatre/gaming rig, and the other as a general purpose seat for web browsing, youtube watching, programming, etc.

My question is how powerful of a CPU do i really need to play games on one seat while someone else is doing whatever on the other?

Only the first seat will have a GPU (probably something along the lines of a gtx960). The second seat won't need one.

I imagine the most intensive task i will be running on the second seat is some digital painting, or perhaps compiling some small programs.

I'd like to specify that i'm not looking for a specific reccomendation, just general specifications like 'you might want at least n amount of cores/threads' or 'more than x ghz clock speed because...'

Answer 1

Most-likely the computational intensive task is web browsing since javascript can at times run away. I'd look at core i3, core i5 with as much memory as you an buy, the browser will consume what it can.

Answer 2

No one can accurately answer this question because it depends on what programs are being used and what tasks are being done. Where tasks can use optimised code (eg accellerated video playback using built in GPU, or encryption using AES instructions built onto the CPU), very little CPU is required.

Similarly with web browsing, you can get lightweight sites and heavyweight sites, and some of it depends on how many tabs the browser is using.

Further, not all CPU's in the same class are created equal.

One thing to consider is how many threads a system can use - it may be beneficial to get a CPU with more threads but slightly slower cores, rather then fewer fast cores, because you know more more things are going to run simultaneously.

You also want to pay attention to RAM and disk - for most of what you have described (with the possible exception of gaming and maybe compiling code), memory and especially disk - ie get SSD's - is more important then CPU.