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i5 or i7?

Jenkinio

Jenkinio

Jenkinio

Associate
Joined
21 Feb 2011
Posts
128
I'm sure you've had this question before: I'm trying to decide whether I should go for an i5 or i7.
A friend tells me the i7 hyperthreading gives no advantage for my needs (gaming) and to get the i5 3570k, but would the i7 be future-proofing and are we likely to see more HT use in games in the future?

I'm in the process of upgrading my rig and I intend to drive 2x 7950s, so I'm keen to understand whether this would necessitate an i7 or whether an i5 would easily cope.

Also, is there any merit to waiting for Haswell?
Cheers

Jenks
 
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I'm not sure, but I have heard that the 3770k does help if running multiple graphics cards compared to the 3570k. I do a fair bit of screen recording when gaming, which is where the HT helps out.
 
just go with the best chip you can afford

I love my 3770k,could try and wait to see what haswell brings
 
Interesting - were I to go the i7 route I'd go with the vanilla 3770 not the 3770K. The benchmarks I've looked at suggest the difference is pretty minimal, have I missed something?

The decision in my eyes comes down to what do you lose if you spend an extra 60-80 quid on CPU. If your budget can stretch then I'd do it, if it means sacrifices elsewhere then I probably wouldn't.
 
David Bisset said:
Interesting - were I to go the i7 route I'd go with the vanilla 3770 not the 3770K. The benchmarks I've looked at suggest the difference is pretty minimal, have I missed something?

The decision in my eyes comes down to what do you lose if you spend an extra 60-80 quid on CPU. If your budget can stretch then I'd do it, if it means sacrifices elsewhere then I probably wouldn't.
Click to expand...

The 3770k offers an unlocked multiplier allowing one to overclock it, whereas the 3770 has a locked mutiplier so cannot be (apart from 4 speed bins on top of the max turbo or something). It's worth paying the extra for the 3770k for that reason.
 
Ah, thanks :) knew there must be something!

Admittedly I don't overclock anyway (or not until I've moved onto a later system for my main PC, by which time the stats hardly matter) but its worth knowing if people ask :)
 
Depends on the game, but you could easily bottleneck it.
I did a quick test with a 3770 and 7970's.
Ideally need OC'ing for set ups for that, an OC'ed 3570k would blitz a stock 3770/Xeon.
 
What does hyperthreading achieve in graphics processing? I'm pretty new to the PC world, as you may have guessed, having previously done all my gaming on consoles.
 
the cpu can handle two threads at once instead of one

only multithreaded coded games will benefit,more threads=more speed

look at 3dmark11 benchmark threads at the physics scores between the threaded/non threaded cpu's
 
Hyperthreading is like upto 20% gain though going 100%.
Real world gaming usage isn't anywhere near that. If for example, you had the choice between a OC'ed 3570k and 7970 or OC'ed 3770k and 7950, the 7970 would consistently be the better gamer.

wazza300 said:
the cpu can handle two threads at once instead of one

only multithreaded coded games will benefit,more threads=more speed

look at 3dmark11 benchmark threads at the physics scores between the threaded/non threaded cpu's
Click to expand...

No offence, but that's an awful explanation.

In a 3570k one core can execute 1 thread simultaneously, a HT (In the 3770k) core can do 2, however it's only really using excess parts of the core, it's not a massive performance improvement. As IPC increases, as far as I remember it (Maybe I made it up) HT performance will decrease in performance gain. It's definitely a nice feature, but not something that should be at the premium it is.
 
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wazza300 said:
well same thing really,being able to process two threads instead of one with a non multithreaded chip
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The way I explain it to people who are not intimately familiar with CPU microarchitectures is like this.

Imagine a large wall that needs painting. I can make the painting finish quicker simply by adding more painters (i.e. cores) until I get to the point where the painters start slowing each other down because they don't have a big enough wall space to paint on. This is like adding cores.

The other thing I could do is give each painter two paintbrushes and let them paint with both hands at the same time. You should see things go quicker, but probably not by much. This is the equivalent of hyperthreading....
 
arad85 said:
The way I explain it to people who are not intimately familiar with CPU microarchitectures is like this.

Imagine a large wall that needs painting. I can make the painting finish quicker simply by adding more painters (i.e. cores) until I get to the point where the painters start slowing each other down because they don't have a big enough wall space to paint on. This is like adding cores.

The other thing I could do is give each painter two paintbrushes and let them paint with both hands at the same time. You should see things go quicker, but probably not by much. This is the equivalent of hyperthreading....
Click to expand...

Thanks, that's useful. When you understand it like that the 'hyper' part sounds like a massive overstatement!
 
arad85 said:
The other thing I could do is give each painter two paintbrushes and let them paint with both hands at the same time. You should see things go quicker, but probably not by much. This is the equivalent of hyperthreading....
Click to expand...
I hope my employer never reads this, he'd love to see us with a brush in each hand.:D

I found that with sli, a cpu with ht did result in slightly better frame rates.
 
depends how hardcore you want to go... I'll be buying my rig in a month or so, so I've done a fair bit of research and found that the i5 3570k is almost as powerful as the i7 3770k for around £80 less...

Remember, your gaming, your CPU will only use as much juice as your GPU allows it meaning you'd be wasting your time getting a really powerful processor when it will never run to half of its capability. Go with the i5 like myself :P
 
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