i5 Questions

[Arcimbaldo]

Hey all,
I have been thinking of selling my current motherboard and RAM in order to fund an i5 CPU/Motherboard/RAM.
My questions are,

1) On the OCUK website they have h97 h95 and p55's, could someone explain what all of these mean to me as i am getting confused

2) Which i5 CPU should i go for, i was looking at the 750 and have previously heard that these perform better than an i7 when they are teamed up with a single graphics card?

3) Which Motherboard should i go for, any recomendations from people?

4) which ram is it triple channel like the i7 or just dual channel

Thanks for any help

My budget is 300 for motherboard ram and cpu

Arcimbaldo

 

[cmndr_andi]

1) The H57 and H55 are new chipsets introduced with the new Clarkdale i3 and i5 CPUs. These chips have a (relatively) low power graphics processor on the "CPU" chip and these boards allow this graphics chip to be used.

The p55 on the other hand is a mainstream chipset with no provision for onboard graphics, it requires a discrete graphics card. The p55 uses the same 1156 socket as the H55 and h57 - but generallyu has more features and tends to overclock better. For example, the p55 can support x8x8 crossfire, while the H55/57's 2nd PCIe slot is restricted to x4 - so they are not good for multi-gpu systems.

Long story short, if you want an i5 750- get a decent P55 board, ignore H55/57.

2) i5 750, it is a quad core. The rest of the i5s are dual cores with a graphics processor (which you likely won't use if you plan to buy a graphics card). As for being faster than the i7, its marginal - i'd tend to say that at the same clockspeed and turbo off - they are as fast as each other in games. In CPU heavy, multithreaded applications the i7 wins by some distance.

3) I like the look of this board. Its a good overclocker, has "proper" x8x8 crossfire and even supports USB3 and SATA 6G, which is nice.

4) For the P55 and s1156 in general dual channel DDR3 1.65V (or less) is what you want. Triple channel is only on X58/ i7 900 series /s1366. For an i5 setup, I would suggest this RAM at the minute.

 

[Frozennova]

1) All of the motherboard whether P55 or H55 perform similarly however if you wish to purchase an i5 that isnt the 750 you will need one of these to make use of the on-die GPU

2) The 750 is the best value for money of the i5s as this is a quad core without Hyper threading whereas the others are duals with HT and yes due to the i5s having an on-die PCI-E controller they will perform better clock for clock than an i7 in a single GPU setup

3) I would suggest the following although it does run over your budget

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-299-IN £163.99

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-209-GI £86.99

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-028-PA £79.99


4) Triple channel is only for socket for socket 1366 however the performance gains are negligeable for most people

 

[Arcimbaldo]

Ahhh, thanks very much, cna now understand clearly the differences etc. yes i will be running my hd 4850 in the setup until i fork out enough cash for hd 5770/5850
Am i right in saying that this build may be more futureproof than an AMD build, atm i have an AM3 board with an old AMD 5000+ in it, But it uses DDR2 would it be worth me floggin this off along with the cpu and my DDR2 and putting it towards an i5?

Damn this is gonna cost me a lot, Paper round is gonna have to stretch a bit

 

[Frozennova]

Yea your likely to fetch close to £100 maybe more if your lucky with aht kit as DDR2 isnt dropping in price and the older CPUs are holding theyre value well

 

[Arcimbaldo]

Ah well if i did
4x1gb of OCZ 800mhz ram
Gigabyte ma 790x ud4p
amd 5000+
Would about 125 be a fair price for all that?

And back on topic,
I think about 350 is a more realistic budget now, so 100 for ram 100 for motherboard then 150 for the cpu, something along those lines?