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Gaming PC: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00GHz (Devil's Canyon) or Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz (Devil's Cany

NeilF

NeilF

NeilF

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Looking to upgrade from by 6yr old ([email protected]) system.

Performance is mainly for gaming... I use it for other stuff, but performance is not an issue.

So is the extra £90 worth is for the I7?


My impression is the extra features on the I7 are not really important to gaming, but I suspect the I7 is a better long term investment? ie: It will hold its own for longer?

I'd like to do a simply/comfortable overclock if possible to...
 
Depends on what you mean when you say is it worth £90.

Is it worth the £90 if you are going with a GPU like the 970/290/780? Somewhat.

Is it worth it if you are making any sacrifice to the GPU? absolutely not.
 
ALXAndy said:
Depends on what you mean when you say is it worth £90.

Is it worth the £90 if you are going with a GPU like the 970/290/780? Somewhat.

Is it worth it if you are making any sacrifice to the GPU? absolutely not.
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£90 isn't going to stop me buy/doing anything else.

It's simply is the I7 going to give higher performance for longer, and even more importantly are any of its features later going to be utilised (in games)? £90 isn't a lot of money in the scheme of a £1000 machine, but, I'd rather not simply throw it away for no real benefit :)
 
For single graphics card users it'll probably* make basically no difference for the life of the chip (assuming a similar lifespan to your current chip) unless you're really into playing benchmarks. However, relative to the cost of a system it's not that much so up to you inevitably. As you say just gaming I'm ignoring things such as encoding or VMs that make effective use of extra threads already.

*the future having not happened yet we really can't know the answer here. However, looking at the past shows us that this is true e.g. the i5 750 that I'm using vs the i7 920 that was like the i5 but with HT, both lasted fine until now and can still run modern games when clocked up - though the 920 smashes me in benchmarks. The comparison you're looking at has a faster base clockspeed for the i7 than the i5 so I'm assuming you'll clock it up to make it as fast, given it's a 'K' unlocked processor.
For the i7 to gain a significant advantage then games would need to start using more threads well. We do see games starting to use more threads, but normally so badly that you're still really limited by a couple of them so gains are minimal. That should hopefully improve a bit over time but I'd not expect things to run on 8 threads with good scaling over 4 any time soon, nor would I expect CPU to become the limiting factor in many games any time soon.

Personally my philosophy is to keep costs down in order to be able to upgrade again sooner if needed, as if the i5 stops being capable within a few years I imagine it'll be because of a significant change somewhere in how things are done, be it with new architectures, instruction sets or whatever - meaning the i7 will likely fall short too.
 
David Bisset said:
For single graphics card users it'll probably* make basically no difference for the life of the chip (assuming a similar lifespan to your current chip) unless you're really into playing benchmarks. However, relative to the cost of a system it's not that much so up to you inevitably. As you say just gaming I'm ignoring things such as encoding or VMs that make effective use of extra threads already.

*the future having not happened yet we really can't know the answer here. However, looking at the past shows us that this is true e.g. the i5 750 that I'm using vs the i7 920 that was like the i5 but with HT, both lasted fine until now and can still run modern games when clocked up - though the 920 smashes me in benchmarks. The comparison you're looking at has a faster base clockspeed for the i7 than the i5 so I'm assuming you'll clock it up to make it as fast, given it's a 'K' unlocked processor.
For the i7 to gain a significant advantage then games would need to start using more threads well. We do see games starting to use more threads, but normally so badly that you're still really limited by a couple of them so gains are minimal. That should hopefully improve a bit over time but I'd not expect things to run on 8 threads with good scaling over 4 any time soon, nor would I expect CPU to become the limiting factor in many games any time soon.

Personally my philosophy is to keep costs down in order to be able to upgrade again sooner if needed, as if the i5 stops being capable within a few years I imagine it'll be because of a significant change somewhere in how things are done, be it with new architectures, instruction sets or whatever - meaning the i7 will likely fall short too.
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So go i5 with the future of putting the money into a faster Broadwell (1150) in the future I guess?

And you don't recon the 8 (hyperthreaded) cores of the i7 will help over the coming years?
 
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NeilFawcett said:
So go i5 with the future of putting the money into a faster Broadwell (1150) in the future I guess?

And you don't recon the 8 (hyperthreaded) cores of the i7 will help over the coming years?
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It depends on whether Intel stop being so mean and stupid and launch an affordable 8 core CPU that will make coders want to dev for it.

Right now the 5960x is in LOL territory with price, and DDR4 ain't helping it either.

It needs to become a standard, but all the time Intel keep selling -

Dual core.
Dual core + HT.
Quad core.
Quad core unlocked.
Quad core +HT
Quad core +HT unlocked.
Hex core +HT
Octa core +HT

Devs ain't gonna care. When a hex/8 arrives in a proper chipset like X97 that's when it will become the norm.

Right now it's only really for braggarts and show offs, unless of course you are doing it for business to avoid the more expensive Xeons.

They're fantastic for workstations and servers, much less so for gaming. Chocolate teapot springs to mind.
 
ALXAndy said:
I would go with the I7 then. You see far more people still using X58 I7s than you do P55 I5s.
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Can't say I've observed that - and in any case the point is money saved allows you to upgrade sooner, meaning you don't have to stay on old tech as long. The 750 vs 920 case obviously has different socket and I'd not argue that X58 lasted better due to Xeon support but that argument doesn't translate when comparing two socket 1150 CPUs.

NeilFawcett said:
So go i5 with the future of putting the money into a faster Broadwell (1150) in the future I guess?

And you don't recon the 8 (hyperthreaded) cores of the i7 will help over the coming years?
Click to expand...

I'd go with the i5 with the option of going to a faster broadwell, but not necessarily planning on it. The generational gap is normally pretty small as well, so there is not likely to be a huge amount more longevity in a broadwell either.

I expect that 8 threads will help in some scenarios, but that we'll remain graphics-card bottlenecked in almost all gaming scenarios so it'll not really matter outside of benches (I said single-GPU users for a reason - if you're interested in spending loads on graphics cards then my view changes as you can lift the GPU bottleneck).
One reason I expect your CPU to remain sufficient is games are made for mass-market appeal - and even the 4690k is well above the average installed CPU and will remain so for many years. Remember it's not what systems are currently getting sold that matters, it's what users have that games publishers care about. Thread count is not particularly significant to me.
 
It seems the i5 4690k overclocks very well (better than the i7 4790?) to well over 4ghz. Bringing any difference down ever more!

Also runs cooler and uses less power, maybe explaining the beter overclocking!?
 
NeilFawcett said:
It seems the i5 4690k overclocks very well (better than the i7 4790?) to well over 4ghz. Bringing any difference down ever more!

Also runs cooler and uses less power, maybe explaining the beter overclocking!?
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Chips with less going on tend to clock higher. The Pentium dual core anniversary will do 4.8ghz..

You need to remember - these chips are all of the same. IE - Intel give the nod to whoever cuts the wafers, the chips are made. They are then graded and binned before having features cut down and locked out.

So an example - a dual core Pentium comes from the same production line as an I7 does, it either didn't make the grade or Intel have cut out features to make up stock of the cheaper CPUs.

This was evident with the old AMD CPUs, which could be unlocked and put back into use (you'd usually just find they needed more voltage to be their bigger brother, for example).

As thus less crap = less heat. Hence, the I5 should clock higher unless it's a totally lousy I5.

HT, IIRC, adds around 20-30% of an actual physical real core, so when both chips are all singing the I7 should, in theory, splatter the I5.

If you're encoding or use anything that will use the threads? I7 no brainer. I would basically sit down one afternoon and take stock of all of the software you use, then do some research on it.

If it's pure gaming? I5 all day. As I mentioned before, hex and above are only really for servers/WS and braggarts (I admit I did get a kick out of announcing to the world that I had a 3970x, most unlike me but was fun :D )

But yeah, software is key. I just threw a 8 core 16 thread CPU into a Hackintosh because I was under absolutely no doubt at all that Unix would eat it up.

And I was correct too. over 13k in the CPU bench, compared to a Haswell I5 @ 4.2ghz which could barely scrape 8k.

I'm really looking forward to editing with Final Cut Pro, 'cause I know it'll demolish all of those cores and threads :D
 
Easiest way to look at this.

Single GPU = i5
Dual GPU = i7

If your going to have one GPU then the i5 will serve you fine. I see about 70-80% usage in BF4 on a single card with my i5.

Yes the HT of the i7 will make it more future proof but by the time everything properly uses more cores there will be new CPUs anyway.

You also have an AMD GPU. Not sure if you can use Mantle with that one but that will also cut down CPU overhead.
 
JamesM said:
Easiest way to look at this.

Single GPU = i5
Dual GPU = i7

If your going to have one GPU then the i5 will serve you fine. I see about 70-80% usage in BF4 on a single card with my i5.

Yes the HT of the i7 will make it more future proof but by the time everything properly uses more cores there will be new CPUs anyway.

You also have an AMD GPU. Not sure if you can use Mantle with that one but that will also cut down CPU overhead.
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+1
 
Yes. If you won't really miss the £90 get the i7. But it's not going to make such a difference that you're going to notice it if you sat them side by side.
 
joeyjojo said:
Since the price is almost the same, go with the 2133, it'll give you more flexibility OCing.
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Even though it's CL11 over CL9?

I thought when you overclocked your CPU it was completely independent from the memory speed/timings?

ie: You could overclock your 3.5ghz CPU to 4.5ghz and your CL9 1600mhz memory would run unaffected?

Or am I wrong?
 
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