i5-6600k @ 4.8GHz. Low power consumption, ridiculous overclock, screaming single-core, cool temps. It's a thing of beauty.
I currently have an i5 4690k in my tower, and some crappy toaster, ahem I mean Pentium, in my craptop. My previous PC was a s****y prebuilt from HP, that had an AMD a8 APU in it... I killed it running BeamNG. It could run RoR perfectly, just not BeamNG.
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition, overclocked to 4,0-4,2 depending on weather. Does the job well considering the whole PC is almost 9 years old now.
How about an AMD Ryzen 5 1600? --- Post updated --- OT: Intel i5-4200U. (I'm on a laptop) Now running a i7-7700HQ on a new (more like months-old, but I got it brand new that time) laptop. Planning to get a custom PC at some point.
I had that processor on my laptop as well. was quite shit. Now I got a i5-6600K in my custom pc so thats quite an upgrade
4790k, still trucking after 3+ years, don't intend to upgrade it anytime soon. 16gb's of DDR3-2400mhz RAM does it well for fast BeamNG'ing (yes, RAM speed/latency DOES matter). 4.4ghz, locked @ that speed, delidded with liquid metal paste under the heat-spreader, and large Phanteks air cooler keeping it under 65~70C or so. Can't really make it much faster without going into the red zone or just making a whole heck of a lot of noise. 2xxx~4xxx series CPUs are still very relevant today and will be for a few more years, until you need more cores. Only original C-stepping 920 cpus, 1st generation i3/i5, second generation i3, or any AMD FX or Core2 users need to worry about upgrading. Socket 775 core2 machines can often be fitted with a later-revision 771 XEON and a socket converter/interposer for petty cash. Socket 1366 (x58 chipset) (socket B?) machines can be fitted with XEONs such as 54xx Westmere (4c/8t) or 56xx (6c/12t) cpus. Socket 775 and 1366 upgrades (especially 775 to 771 with interposer) are done at user's risk and without warranty, usually needing a bios update or bios hack. FX CPU/APU + BeamNG = poo! Toss these to charity and buy a used intel CPU or Ryzen!
I've got a Ryzen 5 1500X @ 3.7 GHz, 16 GB DDR4 3000 MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX, and an EVGA 1060 6 GB FTW+. Runs highest setting at around 85-150 FPS!
Ryzen LOVES fast memory, that makes everything better. I bet that's AT LEAST 10~12% better performance in Beamng.drive vs stock 2133mhz. That would line up to the tests done. Why add this slightly off-topic reply? To remind all, if you build a Ryzen, it pays to get good memory. If you pay an extra 10~20% more for the memory, no sweat, even 25% extra on RAM is worth it, as a properly equipped 2933mhz Ryzen will best an i7 6900k w/2400mhz quad channel DDR4 by 10% at the same identical clock-speeds in Beamng.drive performance. Yes, RAM does matter, it matters A LOT when either running highly SMP aware apps, or physics calculations.
I had lots of cpus, from a pentium 4 mobile 2.66GHz to more recently an i7 4710hq at 3.7 GHz thanks to a modded bios and throttlestop on my old lenovo y50 Now (since august 2016) I use a xeon e5 2650 v3 ES (10 cores, 2.2GHz) The i7 was really OG in that laptop and could handle ANY game, but it can't multitask nor compute like that xeon (and I got these sweet 1080TIs for games)