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i3 vs i5 vs i7 Gaming performance

Scottland

Scottland

Scottland

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
15,723
Location
North Wales
Hi,

At the moment I have an i3 4360T (35w) haswell chip paired with a GTX970. I'm pondering upgrading the i3 to either an i5 or i7 - but would be another lower power version.

Reading around various sites, I can see performance increases vary from minimal to significant - so I'm a bit unsure if it's worthwhile or not?


Any thoughts?
 
Well I had a AMD 6100 3.3ghz. Upgraded to the I7 4790k also i have GTX 970 and what a difference! The old chip was bottle necking the card. Plus temps are so much better and less strain on the GPU.
 
I'd say your biggest boost will come from going dual core to quad core. While many games are still limited to 2 threads, not all are, and your OS/background apps won't be in the way of the game threads as they can move to the other cores.

If you are dead set on sticking to a 35W TDP cpu, the options and gain are reduced, but the 4785T could be a good choice.

I'd strongly consider going for the 4790S though, means 65W TDP which is still pretty low, and gives you a base 3.2ghz as you have now along with a 4ghz turbo. At those speeds you'll see a big boost even in single threaded apps.
 
Baden said:
Well I had a AMD 6100 3.3ghz. Upgraded to the I7 4790k also i have GTX 970 and what a difference! The old chip was bottle necking the card. Plus temps are so much better and less strain on the GPU.
Click to expand...

Then you simply don't know what you're doing.
 
I'm having second thoughts on keeping it low power, I'm half tempted to just stick in a 4690K and have done with it. I'm just trying to gauge how much real world performance I'll gain (in games).

The reason I initially wanted low TDP is because it acts as a 27x7 'file server' at home, but I'm also gaming on it now gaming picked up a 970 :p
 
ALXAndy said:
Then you simply don't know what you're doing.
Click to expand...

No idea what i'm doing? I have a thread on my upgrade and simply giving the advise i was giving! I noticed a huge difference when i upgraded and more than happy so, sorry for having a opinion...
 
Scottland said:
I'm having second thoughts on keeping it low power, I'm half tempted to just stick in a 4690K and have done with it. I'm just trying to gauge how much real world performance I'll gain (in games).

The reason I initially wanted low TDP is because it acts as a 27x7 'file server' at home, but I'm also gaming on it now gaming picked up a 970 :p
Click to expand...

Build yourself a cheap PC something like amd 5350 kabini for the file server, max 25w and that is really max tdp. Then intel chip you have will not be constrained to 35w if you are taxing both the cpu and on-board gpu.

also running a graphics card in idle you are wasting quite some power too. By buying full spec chip you get something really fast in games and also still have a dedicated lower power file server, this way you will actually save electricity and can even use the low power pc for surfing the net. This is what i have done/doing currently.

Or another optoin is to buy a full powered chip and under volt them to reduce the TDP. I am not sure if its possible to under clock them, i am assuming its still possible to set lower multipliers on the i7 1155 chips?
 
AMDPower said:
Or another optoin is to buy a full powered chip and under volt them to reduce the TDP. I am not sure if its possible to under clock them, i am assuming its still possible to set lower multipliers on the i7 1155 chips?
Click to expand...

If you enable the various power states (some are on by default) and make use of the right power profile in windows even the high end i7s will reduce clocks and voltage massively depending on load/idle - IIRC on default settings my 4820K uses about 12watt average in mixed light/idle desktop use.
 
AMDPower said:
Build yourself a cheap PC something like amd 5350 kabini for the file server, max 25w and that is really max tdp. Then intel chip you have will not be constrained to 35w if you are taxing both the cpu and on-board gpu.
Click to expand...

I think this.

Split the server and gaming PC.

Having a GPU on idle 24/7 will eat power (offset having a low power CPU anyway).

I think your i3 may be bottlenecking the 970 a bit, so upgrading to a 4690k (for example) will give you a big boost.
 
for gaming an i3 is a no, the Pentium K is better. i7 is a little over kill in 99% of game have no or little gain from HT. right now the sweet spot is i5
 
P4Clock said:
for gaming an i3 is a no, the Pentium K is better. i7 is a little over kill in 99% of game have no or little gain from HT. right now the sweet spot is i5
Click to expand...

Thats a bit 'harsh' (can't think of the word im actually looking for).

The i5 is the sweetspot but if you're on a budget and wanting a light/med gaming rig the i3 is a good CPU, it offers more threads than the pentium K which (if you're not into OCing) puts it firmly ahead. Pairing it with a card like a GTX660 or 7850 would result in a very decent mid level rig.

In this case though, low power i3 + GTX 970.. A bit of an issue, as i've discussed above.
 
Not really interested in a separate server, reducing idle wattage is helpful but its not going to be 24x7 all the time anymore so not a major concern.
 
P4Clock said:
for gaming an i3 is a no, the Pentium K is better. i7 is a little over kill in 99% of game have no or little gain from HT. right now the sweet spot is i5
Click to expand...

HT seems a mixed story but its been good for me - overall I've found it makes for smoother performance in a few reasonably threaded games even when the raw FPS numbers are the same.
 
With the i7 though, is the price premium worth any additional performance in games? i5 does seem to be the sweet spot, logical I guess considering its the piggy in the middle.
 
Scottland said:
With the i7 though, is the price premium worth any additional performance in games? i5 does seem to be the sweet spot, logical I guess considering its the piggy in the middle.
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If you do anything else while gaming, then yes a I7 is worth it. Watching movies on a second monitor, being on a skype video call, watching a stream, all these little things eat up CPU cycles.
 
I think you should go for the 4690k or 4790k.

Yes, there is a 53W TDP difference, and yes, if you pay 12p per KWh and leave it on 24/7, it will cost you an extra £52.66 or so to run.

But that misses a crucial point, most of the time it's sat at idle. As both the 88W, 65W, and 35W CPUs reduce voltage and downclock massively at idle, I would bet there is very little difference between them. Let's say it's 10W, that would be under £10 a year.
 
Rroff said:
HT seems a mixed story but its been good for me - overall I've found it makes for smoother performance in a few reasonably threaded games even when the raw FPS numbers are the same.
Click to expand...

Unless you've recorded the frame times this is anecdotal, sorry. I would hazard that just the act of upgrading makes games "feel smoother" whether it's true or not!

See the link below. In 5/6 games the difference between the i5-4690K and i7-4790K is less than 1 FPS in average and minimum FPS. If your eyes can detect 1 FPS then hats off to you! :p

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k

Conventional wisdom says you want an i7 for multi-GPU, but even then the difference is small, on average exactly the same performance (some games are 5% faster, some 5% slower with the i7, averages out to +0.05% improvement in those 6 games). Maybe with more powerful GPUs or different games it's a different story, but an i7 has got to be the worst value for money upgrade in gaming.
 
an i3 is the worst buy ever. buy an i5 that about all there is to say.

BUT.... If you have the cash for an i7 and want 1 then get one, although as said its a 0.05% increase in most games. save the cast and put it to an better GPU.
 
joeyjojo said:
Unless you've recorded the frame times this is anecdotal, sorry. I would hazard that just the act of upgrading makes games "feel smoother" whether it's true or not!

See the link below. In 5/6 games the difference between the i5-4690K and i7-4790K is less than 1 FPS in average and minimum FPS. If your eyes can detect 1 FPS then hats off to you! :p

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k

Conventional wisdom says you want an i7 for multi-GPU, but even then the difference is small, on average exactly the same performance (some games are 5% faster, some 5% slower with the i7, averages out to +0.05% improvement in those 6 games). Maybe with more powerful GPUs or different games it's a different story, but an i7 has got to be the worst value for money upgrade in gaming.
Click to expand...

Can do side by side testing by turning HT on and off not just from upgrading, some games there is a definite difference you don't even need frametime comparisons (which I'm quite familiar with having written software to test it before the whole FCAT thing came along). Some games there is no difference at all and some people have problems with HT and stutter though 1-2 titles aside where there were issues that is mostly down to specific systems and/or user error.

EDIT: And 1fps difference tells you absolutely nothing about the consistency of the frame update rate which is kind of funny thing to say after mentioning frametimes :P a system say pumping out 60 frames a second but with a 30+ms gap and then a burst of 8ms frames will feel very different to 60fps with a nice regular 16.667ms between updates.
 
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