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i7 or i5?

seano

seano

seano

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Joined
23 Dec 2011
Posts
1
Hi people!

I'm building a new computer and am wondering whether to go for the i5 or i7 SB processor. I don't know much about computers at all but i'm building the computer for gaming and intend to learn overclocking.

Would it be worth paying the bit extra for the i7? The clock speeds are pretty close and i've noticed an i3 at 3.3ghz! Am I paying the extra for that 0.1ghz more or is there some other advantage the i7 has over the i5? Can the i7 be overclocked further or something?
 
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The i7 has Hyperthreading which is handy for audio/video encoding and stuff like that, for everything else (gaming and general multitasking) an i5 is just as good.

The i7 also has slightly more L3 cache but again this only benefits a small portion of applications.

If you're planning to overclock make sure you get the 'K' version (ie. 2500K, 2600K), those without a K are locked.
 
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Seems the i5 is never trounced and holds its own very well - especially since it is half the cost pretty much. I was going to go i7 but having doubts now..
 
The 2500K is 99% as good for 95% of jobs. Unless you know you need the extra 1% of performance, or you are doing the other 5% of jobs then get the 2500K. *


* made up, approximate figures.
 
Stoner81 said:
i5 2500K all the way unless you do lots with video rendering/encoding and Photoshop work.
Click to expand...
I have an i7-2600K and my other interests are photography (where I have a camera that produces 21Mpixel RAW files @ up to 30Mbytes in size) and reencoding recorded off-air TV programs to put on our media server.

I tried turning off the hyperthreading in the BIOS and retried a couple of benchmarks. I think for photoshopping I wouldn't really notice the difference and for reencoding videos (HD -> x264 via ffmpeg) I lost about 15% speed in the non hyperthreaded mode. What was interesting was that in the first pass where you aren't maxing out CPU, the non hyperthreaded mode was faster.

I'd recommend an i5 every time unless you want that extra 10-20% when encoding videos.
 
£150 for the 2500k atm is a bargain, snag one while you can.

I grabbed one a week ago and haven't been disappointed!
 
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