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i7 or i5? worth the upgrade?

ichigotowar

ichigotowar

ichigotowar

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Joined
2 Jul 2008
Posts
134
I have a qx6850 on a p45 mobo asus dexule. I was wondering if it was worth me upgrading to i5 or i7. i truly do not know which one is better. i mainly use my pc for gaming, video editing and making live casts for HoN/RA3. I could really do with some advice here, thanks in advance.
 
i need it more for editing and casting tbh. i think i'm just cpu limited tbh, and wondered it it would do me any good upgrading, also i'm on air cooling and my chip gets extremely hot :(
 
C64 said:
No because there's no software that needs an upgrade yet.
Click to expand...


I think you might be write. I just upgraded from a quad core q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz to an i7 860 which I have just got overclocked stable at 3.8gz.

So i was thinking wow lets do some ripping. So I ripped a dvd to xvid. Speed improvement??? 15% at best! I can see all 8 cores with hyperthreading in the i7 860 at just 60% loading. IMO the app isnt properly optimized for correct multi threading. I suspect thats the same with lots of apps out there as well.
 
entireweb said:
I think you might be write. I just upgraded from a quad core q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz to an i7 860 which I have just got overclocked stable at 3.8gz.

So i was thinking wow lets do some ripping. So I ripped a dvd to xvid. Speed improvement??? 15% at best! I can see all 8 cores with hyperthreading in the i7 860 at just 60% loading. IMO the app isnt properly optimized for correct multi threading. I suspect thats the same with lots of apps out there as well.
Click to expand...

You'll probably find that only big boys 3D apps will be capable of using 8 threads correctly. Apps like sorenson squeeze, cleaner etc usually only use 2 or 4 threads maximum depending what format you're encoding to.

I'd still get the i7 though if its only £40 more.
 
Evil-I said:
You'll probably find that only big boys 3D apps will be capable of using 8 threads correctly. Apps like sorenson squeeze, cleaner etc usually only use 2 or 4 threads maximum depending what format you're encoding to.

I'd still get the i7 though if its only £40 more.
Click to expand...

£40 more? when i did the comparison there was a price difference of £100 unless i'm doing something wrong:(
 
Hmm, my personal opinion is no.

I did some research and found several different sets of Benchmarks that pit a Q9650 (3.0Ghz) against a i7 920 (2.6Ghz), at stock clocks.

And they trade blows. Upto 10% performance gap either way depending on the tests. More system memory intensive benchmarks favoured the i7, those relying on CPU grunt, the Q9650.

If you chuck overclocking into the mix (both chips are known to do upto around 4ghz on average), then the Q9650 advantage will dissapear in the non-memory tests, but still would be within a 10% margin I estimate.

So for me, my opinion stands as a firm No if your upgrading from a Core 2 Quad, but a Yes if your buying a new platform. Even then I would consider i5 first, unless your going multi-GPU in which case you want X58 and i7.
 
i just changed from a q6600 to a i7 920 DO stepping and not noticed that much difference in general use,but using ripbot264 now to encode full 1080p movie's as halfed the time.they use to take overnight between 10 - 13 hours now i have done 2 and its taken 5 - 6 hours.plus my wmp opens and reacts quicker now but apart from those two things up to now not notice that much of a big difference.
 
entireweb said:
The clearest "night and day" speed increase to my system is after switching to SSD.
Click to expand...

+1

I had a Core 2 1.86 (with 6GB mem), then added SSD big gain.

Gone to I5 (with 8GB mem), very nice gain but the SSD on old Core 2 was the biggest hitter.

Back to I5, 2 weeks ago I got the I5, Gigabyte Board, 8GB Corsair XMS 3 memory, Artic 7 cooler for £400, You can't have everything, and price/performance with i5 rig i'm happy. i5 uses a little less power over i7.

The exception for i7 is video editing, so if your doing this defo i7, otherwise I think most be happy with i5.
 
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