Best CPU for Hearts of Iron IV

Best CPU for Hearts of Iron IV? Let's find out

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The 4th iteration of the popular wargame series, Hearts of Iron IV is an immersive strategy game that revolves around World War 2. The game lets you pick a nation and lead it to victory with clever tactics and intelligent decision-making. Today, we’re looking at the best CPU for Hearts of Iron IV. 

Now Read: Best CPU for gaming

Having a capable CPU lets you run games at a steady framerate without annoying stutters and lag spikes, which translates to a better overall gaming experience.

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What are the CPU requirements for Hearts of Iron IV?

Paradox recommends you use an Intel® Core™ i5 2500K or AMD® Ryzen 3 2200G for Hearts of Iron IV. Both of these processors are quad-cores without hyperthreading or multithreading. Plus, they’re almost a decade old at this point. 

Of course, we’ll be recommending you something much more recent. We’re also keeping price-to-performance in mind with our recommendation since raw performance alone isn’t as much of a concern when running games with low computational demands. 

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Best CPU for Hearts of Iron IV – Ryzen 5 7600X

The best CPU for Hearts of Iron IV is the Ryzen 5 7600X, not to be confused with the Ryzen 5 7600. We’re talking about the X edition 7600 in this case, which was released in Q4 2022. I’ll explain why that matters in a minute. 

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X

Cores

6

Threads

12

Base speed

4.7GHz

Boost speed

5.3GHz

Cache

L3 32MB

Socket

AM5

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The Ryzen 5 7600X is a powerful processor tailor-made to suit the requirements of gamers. It comes equipped with 6 cores and 12 threads. While that’s a comparatively lower thread count than many of the flashier CPUs out there, it’s a healthy amount for a gaming processor to have. 

See, most games don’t utilize all available threads. The bulk of a game’s processing demands are fulfilled by a select few threads running at their highest manageable clock speed. 

The remaining threads only carry out secondary processing, some minor tasks here and there, and any processes unrelated to the running game that may be going on in the background. 

Resource-monitoring overlays show us that this is indeed the case with Hearts of Iron IV. The game is run primarily on a single CPU core, while the remaining cores remain utilized in mere single-digit percentages. 

Therefore, single-thread performance (directly tied to a processor’s boost clock speed) ends up being much more influential to in-game FPS than thread count. 

And in that regard, we see the Ryzen 5 7600X feature a fairly high 5.3GHz boost clock – that’s the reason we recommend going for the X variant, in particular.

Ryzen 5 7600

The standard edition 7600 has a comparatively lower 5.1GHz boost clock. This 200MHz difference will be felt, especially when you fast forward time, which increases the load on the thread running the game even further. 

The threaded Ryzen 5 7600X, with its 12 threads and best-in-class boost clock, is an incredible gaming processor that can comfortably run the most advanced titles today. A light, undemanding game such as Hearts of Iron IV won’t be a problem, even if you crank the settings up to max. 

The only instances where you may notice a slight FPS drop would be while fast-forwarding time. But even then, with a 5.3GHz boost clock, the loss in performance will be practically unnoticeable.

If you would like to eliminate the performance dip entirely, you can always overclock the 7600X to add a further few hundred MHz to its already top-tier clock speeds. Do remember that overclocking comes at the expense of power usage and thermal performance.