i5 vs i7 - a computer building question

Lucascraft

My 6 year old desktop died about a week ago. Given the age, I think its time to just get a new computer. I've never done the computer build thing before, but I've got a friend who has lots of experience with it who has offered to help me.

I guess my question is, in looking ahead, is getting an i7 processor gonna be a better long term decision? Looking at the actual specs between the current high-end i5s versus the current i7s, they appear to be very comparable. Does the i7 processor really offer that much more processing power, or is it just a slight and incremental upgrade?

Is this something I can go with an i5 and save around 150-200 dollars, or is the extra price worth it?

Bonus question: I don't follow the hardware industry very closely to know what's on the horizon or where industry trends are heading. If I buy an i5 or an i7, is there going to be an i8 or i9 soon?

Day of the Bear

What do you primarily use your machine for? There are some things the i7 does much better but others it's more or less comparable to the i5

Lucascraft

Mostly gaming. I want a rig that can run TOR at max settings.

GnomeTank

And even those things the i7 does "better" with Hyper-Threading have been called in to question with some benchmarks. There are certainly places where the HT does come in to play and does make it better though.

(full disclosure, I have an i5-2500k, and I wouldn't trade it for an i7...I just don't do enough seriously threaded stuff that has the correct cache ordering optimizations to make use of HT).

Foomy

if your just gaming and want to save some money the i3-2120 is a great cpu, the added benefit of extra cores for most applications is negligible. and the cost savings let you buy a better video card, which will help more than the cpu on modern games.
if you feel up to overclocking (which is really easy on these chips) than get an i5-2500k and an aftermarket cooler. the extra cores don't help much, but being able to run it at 4 to 4.5ghz is a great boost in power
i7's are for people with too much money, or who definitely know that they need a lot of cores to get work done.

stop by the computer build thread, and we can help you pick out all the parts to build a nice machine:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/150453/computer-build-thread-anxiously-awaiting-kepler-oh-and-the-7970-is-out/

Day of the Bear

For tor an i3 would cut it yeah.

IfYour budget allows I'd still get the i5 2500k because I'm of the opinion that going forward we'll see more games fully utilize quad cores, but that is a speculative opinion.

GnomeTank

I run ToR on max settings on my rig, it's a Core i5-2500k with 16gb of DDR3 (you don't need this much, 4-8 is fine) and a Radeon HD6870.

TychoCelchuuu

i3 would do fine, i5 is overkill, i7 would be a waste.

CarbonFire

TychoCelchuuu wrote:

i3 would do fine, i5 is overkill, i7 would be a waste.

I agree that the i7 would be a waste, but question whether the i5 is really overkill.

If the OP plays all his games on a console, and only needs this computer for surfing the web and playing less-demanding MMOs, then yes, the i3 would be sufficient. If the OP wants to do further PC gaming in the future however (and have this computer last him another 4-6 years), then the i5 would be a much more sound investment for the $80 or so more it'd cost. I just have a real hard time suggesting anyone get a dual-core CPU these days if they're even remotely interested in gaming. Everything from here on out will be highly threaded, and the next-gen console ports will certainly benefit from having access to more cores (if not outright require them for more demanding games).

Stormwatcher

core i5 2500K is the best thing, it will have long legs and is not very expensive. I went from a c2d e8400 to a ci5 2500k and ALL the games got a lot better. Crysis 2 went from "only playable on dx9" to "dx11 mode with full hi res textures and tesselation is my bitch".

Ego

If you want a system that'll last awhile but still fit a budget, the i5 2500k is definitely the way to go. More and more programs are taking advantage of four cores, a trend that'll only continue in demanding applications. And the chip overclocks excellently. It's absolutely the best bang for your buck right now.

That said, TOR would run flawlessly on an i3. But again, if your aim is a little bit of longevity (such as things go in the computing world,) I'd say i5.

GnomeTank

You also can't assume that ToR won't evolve to use a quad-core as well. WoW started out almost exclusively single threaded, but over the years Blizzard added background loading of assets, downloading streaming, and several other things that allow WoW to really flex a multi-core CPU. Don't be surprised when ToR does the same over the years.

Rohan

Stormwatcher wrote:

core i5 2500K is the best thing, it will have long legs and is not very expensive. I went from a c2d e8400 to a ci5 2500k and ALL the games got a lot better. Crysis 2 went from "only playable on dx9" to "dx11 mode with full hi res textures and tesselation is my bitch".

Hm. This was not my experience at all. I made the same step-up you did - C2D E8400 to i5 2500, 8GB DDR2 to 16GB DDR3, as well as a graphical upgrade from a HD4870 to a HD6870. I must say that I've only really experienced increased performance on really demanding games, such as Crysis 2. One of my flatmates now has the C2D system and I haven't really seen any differences in performance in say, Battlefield 3.

I've built several pc's for my friends over the last year, all very similar. Core i5 2300/2400, 8GB ram, HD6850. One friend went for a Core i3 2100, and we have yet to see a game that really takes those i5's and performs above and beyond the i3. They all perform very closely in the games we're playing, which can range from really old ones like Flatout 2 to newer games like Battlefield 3 and SWTOR.

GnomeTank

You're looking at performance as purely "what's my FPS RIGHT NOW", when it has more to do with: How high can I turn the physics? Can I tab out and easily browse to a website? What if I'm watching a movie on my second monitor? What if the game is heavily multi-threaded, like Crysis?

Take a game like Battlefield 3. You may not notice an FPS difference, but BF3 automatically scales down the physics engine depending on the CPU power available to it, and the physics engine is multi-threaded. The more oomph it has across more cores, the more BF3 will scale up the physics simulation to appear more realistic to you.

High end multi-core CPU's aren't purely about making every game running at a higher FPS. It's as much about computer responsiveness under load, such as when running an intensive game.

Stormwatcher

Rohan wrote:

Stormwatcher wrote:

core i5 2500K is the best thing, it will have long legs and is not very expensive. I went from a c2d e8400 to a ci5 2500k and ALL the games got a lot better. Crysis 2 went from "only playable on dx9" to "dx11 mode with full hi res textures and tesselation is my bitch".

Hm. This was not my experience at all. I made the same step-up you did - C2D E8400 to i5 2500, 8GB DDR2 to 16GB DDR3, as well as a graphical upgrade from a HD4870 to a HD6870. I must say that I've only really experienced increased performance on really demanding games, such as Crysis 2. One of my flatmates now has the C2D system and I haven't really seen any differences in performance in say, Battlefield 3.

I've built several pc's for my friends over the last year, all very similar. Core i5 2300/2400, 8GB ram, HD6850. One friend went for a Core i3 2100, and we have yet to see a game that really takes those i5's and performs above and beyond the i3. They all perform very closely in the games we're playing, which can range from really old ones like Flatout 2 to newer games like Battlefield 3 and SWTOR.

Lol u crasy.

But seriously, there's probably something really fucked up about your new system.

I got very noticeable performance jumps on ANY game released after 2007. Did you reinstall windows and get the latest drivers for everything? Just using windows generic drivers won't work.

Also, I have my Asus mobo doing a kickass automatic overclock to 4.3GHz whenever I start a game or anything CPU intensive. Even a strictly dual or single core game would be running with more than 33% more GHz than with the e8400.

Rohan

Nope, I really haven't noticed much of a difference in the games I've been playing on both systems. I of course reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows, and have all the drivers updated by downloading them from their respective manufacturer's sites. As GnomeTank says above, one thing I have noticed is that multitasking while gaming is much more capable and stable with the new system, but apart from new games like Battlefield 3, and the very high-end settings of Shogun 2 and Crysis 2, not much has improved in my gaming, whether we're talking about IQ or performance. Even in the processor intensive GTA IV ports.

I wish I could overclock my chip, but unfortunately I cheaped out at the time and went for a non-K 2500, along with a motherboard (Asus, I always go with Asus) that wouldn't allow me even if it was a 2500K.

GnomeTank

Yeah, these days, CPU's aren't all about linear performance upgrades, though you can still get those from a CPU upgrade. Getting a new CPU these days is really about system responsiveness and under load usage. How responsive can my system stay as I am heavily multitasking? When I went from a Core 2 Quad Q9550 to my i5-2500k, the direct linear performance of most tasks wasn't really effected. It was my multitasking performance where I saw the biggest gains. My overall system responsiveness. I am sure I gained some frames in some games, just purely because of the higher clock rate and more efficient pipeline of the i5...but it wasn't drastic, night and day type stuff.

lowlylowlycook

GnomeTank wrote:

Yeah, these days, CPU's aren't all about linear performance upgrades, though you can still get those from a CPU upgrade. Getting a new CPU these days is really about system responsiveness and under load usage. How responsive can my system stay as I am heavily multitasking? When I went from a Core 2 Quad Q9550 to my i5-2500k, the direct linear performance of most tasks wasn't really effected. It was my multitasking performance where I saw the biggest gains. My overall system responsiveness. I am sure I gained some frames in some games, just purely because of the higher clock rate and more efficient pipeline of the i5...but it wasn't drastic, night and day type stuff.

For system responsiveness you really want a SSD.

GnomeTank

lowlylowlycook wrote:

GnomeTank wrote:

Yeah, these days, CPU's aren't all about linear performance upgrades, though you can still get those from a CPU upgrade. Getting a new CPU these days is really about system responsiveness and under load usage. How responsive can my system stay as I am heavily multitasking? When I went from a Core 2 Quad Q9550 to my i5-2500k, the direct linear performance of most tasks wasn't really effected. It was my multitasking performance where I saw the biggest gains. My overall system responsiveness. I am sure I gained some frames in some games, just purely because of the higher clock rate and more efficient pipeline of the i5...but it wasn't drastic, night and day type stuff.

For system responsiveness you really want a SSD.

Got one, and yes you do.

Tef

I'm with gnome tank, regarding the largest appreciable gains on modern CPUs being mutlitasking responsiveness. Having a quad core OCed to 5GHz means that I can run a huge amount of tasks (encoding a movie, running a virus scan, backing up my system drive, ripping a movie to my hard disk and playing L4D2) at one time without getting any noticeable lag in response time.

Agreed on an SSD being an excellent purchase for system responsiveness too

GnomeTank

Even a slow last gen SSD is such a huge performance upgrade over a spindle drive, it's worth grabbing one if you're on a budget and can't afford a newer SATA 3 drive.

Lucascraft

Oh believe me, a SSD is definitely on my list of parts. I think I'm gonna order everything on Sunday. Should be able to get it built by the end of next week.