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worth getting i7 over i5

well i've already bought 2x sapphire 6950's so am fine on gfx front at the moment i'd say,
Was looking at benchmarks of them both on normal stock there isnt huge difference
 
Well you mention k versions so I'd be very surprised if you just left it at stock :)

How about an SSD then with that saving, or a good cooler? ^_^
 
nah certainly won't be leaving it at stock speeds, was just wondering would it make much difference getting i7 over the i5 :)

As for SSD I've order ocz agility 3 120gb, and am installing watercooling system to cool CF & cpu...whichever one i decide to get :P
 
I have owned both, but kept the 2500K due to lower purchase cost and cooler running within a SFF case . Real world performance is almost identical, and I really could not tell the difference between them apart from when encoding 1080p Blu-Ray's. Even here, if I have to wait 90mins for an encode, I may as well wait 2hours.

BF3 will place more stress on graphics than processors. Just becasue the games touts that it supports hyerthreading does not mean that it will do it well and distribute load effectively/evenly between all cores. A 2500K will be more than sufficient for BF3.

Save your money and get a 2500K. It is the sensible choice, especially considering both processes will run at less than 50% utilisation for 99% of the time.
 
Depends what you do. I got the i7 as it represented value for my usage. The extra money it costs was not exactly bank breaking, it's nice to have HT and the additional flexibility.

I do a fair amount of video encoding but even if I did not I would still opt for the i7. Most people building on budgets will go for the i5 though, nothing wrong with that but if the extra money is a non-issue give the i7 a punt.
 
As much as i'd prefer to have the extra threads for flexibility etc etc for the general usage and games you wouldn't see the difference.
I think i would look at the £60 and think nuts to it, i'm going to the pub to get wasted or get a few gig tickets.
 
Would a game actually benefit by turning off hyperthreading on a quad cpu? i would have thought running on one core would be a bottleneck no?
 
Usually only because it reduces heat output, which means you can get a higher overclock.

Personally my CPU isn't a bottleneck for any of the games I play and I do some video encoding so it's obviously better for me to leave it on.
 
Would this have to been turned off in the bios? Dont mean to sound stupid but by turning this off are you effectively running on just 1 core rather than 4?
 
TheJackal said:
I thought hyperthreading was where it created two virtual threads per core, not turn off all the cores except one?
Click to expand...

This.

4 Cores, 8 threads.

i7_taskmgr.jpg
 
Yeah, this machine will be mainly for gaming, building it to run bf3 in full spec

so might just get the i5, OC it since I'm installing WC'ing, hyperthreading is only thing that I'll be lacking ..

As long as I wont have any trouble playing BF3 smoothly in full spec with an i5 2500k , 8GB RAM, 2x sapphire 2gb 6950's then ill be happy
 
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