New Computer time. (technical questions).

azith28

My current system has been getting really cloggy lately, and is kinda old, so im going to go by microcenter this week and pick out a new toy. Looking at the sale flyer, I realize its been awhile since ive had to do this, and have some questions.

I'm pretty comfortable with hardware, i just havent kept up on recent trends/changes so you can talk techy to me.

Whats the difference between 3rd and 4th generation processors (Intel)? I'm looking at two different systems, both i5 cores, same speed, but since the generation is different its more expensive. i know the generation generally means less power usage, runs cooler, but is the leap really worth it?

i5 core vs i7 core. I figured id go with an i5, id like an i7 if the price wasnt too much of a leap but dont know a whole lot about what the difference is. I gather that i3 is low end, i5 mid, i7 high? anything else to this?

I'll be gaming a good bit on this. I know i use to have to worry about the size of the power supply for higher end video cards, but im aware power requirements have gone way down. I'm not looking to SLI or anything, maybe an nvidia in the 600 series should do me just fine. any suggestions? looking to spend about 100-120 on the video card.

Thanks

Jebus314

You'll get more responses if you post in the computer build thread. That being said you are generally correct about the difference between architectures (generations) being less heat/power usage with more processing power. Whether or not it's worth it is going to depend entirely on what you want to do with it. For gaming you are mostly hampered by gpu's these days so there's nothing wrong with going for an older ivy-bridge (i5-3xxx) or even sandy bridge (i5-2xxx) depending on which games you play and if you are willing to overclock.

The difference between i3/i5/i7 is the number of cores (2 plus HT/4/4plus HT respectively). HT is hyper-threading which doubles the number of cores by implementing virtual cores. It typically results in somewhere around 30% increase in performance for heavily multi-threaded applications, which so far games are not. The i5 is really the sweet spot right now for gaming.

For a single gpu system 500w-600w seems to be the sweet spot, but there's all kinds of psu calculators out there if you are worried. You just put in the parts you want and it gives you a wattage to shoot for.

I don't follow the gpu's as much but the build thread seems to be recommending the new nvidia 760's if you can swing it, and the 660ti was the previous choice if I remember correctly. But again, just post there with your price range and you will get a few recommendations.