• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Is The i7 Really Worth It Just Now?

I'm in the same state of mind. I would love to do an upgrade to i7, UD5, 6gb triple channel but not sure if it will give me a good enough performance increase to justify the price.
 
Depends on many factors; Your current build (if it would be an improvement), also the same could be said with any new cpu out, is it worth it? Techonology advances fast, the i7 quad 4ghz would kick the ass of any processor for a good 3-5 years, dependant on what you use your pc for & seeing as the price is extremley cheap now, yes it's worth it.
 
Can you not just get a bit more out your current CPU? Should definately go higher than 2.8 (around 3.6). Hope the i7's come down in price before you really need a new one :)
 
I just upgraded from a q6600 to a i7 2 weeks ago. I havent seen much of a performance increase yet but i still think
its worth it and glad i have done now.
 
I was faced with this dilema 6 or 7 months back.

From what i can see hardware manufactures innovate and software companies figure out how to fully utilise these innovations quite a long time after when these innovations become more mainstream (ie affordable for the masses). Indeed why would they develop apps for something that only a relatively small proportion of computer users actually own.

My conclusion was yes the I7 is "better", but there would be relatively few applications out there to exlpoit it. I decided that by the time I7 became viable for me in terms of actual usable increased performance, i'd be about ready to build an new system anyway (hopefully at a much lower cost)

However that was a while ago I'd be interested to see how many apps (particularly games) actually utilise the potential of I7 at the moment. I guess once you know this you'd be able to judge whether or not what you do would be enhance by I7.

It's a difficult call as the only way of knowing for sure is to buy one and use it.
 
i7 is a lot faster at Encoding than previous stuff. Gaming wise you'll get a whole 3 frames more perhaps. The faster/bigger RAM will load games and huge files faster. But is it noticeable? That's debatable.

Edit - but it's an upgrade from nothing if you're me. :p
 
Last edited:
Big.Wayne said:
What? you spent money and time but you can't notice the difference and your glad you did the upgrade? :p
Click to expand...

Nope, I have notice a difference but not much of one. In games such as Crysis, Dawn of War 2 I haven’t noticed a difference, I probably do when I play Supreme Commander and max out the units. But when its takes 9mins to encode a 2hr movie instead of 23mins then I do notice.
As everyone says, the i7 is expensive which is true but I’ve spent round about the same on my current i7 setup as I did on my q6600 B3 when the first Intel price cuts came round few years ago.
If people so concerned about the price of the i7, what’s wrong with selling their old setup and put towards it?
 
I've been wondering the same as op as I to am running q6600 at 3.78ghz though. I doubt we will see any difference in games! And even though my encoding dose take about 16mins I don't think bring that down to 8-9 mins is worth it at the moment with current prices. I think waiting till around christmas for another couple of price drops then the upgrade would be justified. Firstly up the clock on your q6600 plenty of room there to be had.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom