i5 or i7

D

dR.Jester

2[H]4U
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Jun 7, 2004
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So I have this motherboard sitting around and cannot decide which processor to buy, currently I have an i7 3770K. I know new stuff is coming out this fall but I already have a board so might as well get a new proc.

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Originally I was looking at the 4970K, but now Ive got friends telling me to get an i5 instead.

Thoughts?
 
Well, your 3770k is probably as valuable as its going to be right now. If you sell that, you can probably get pretty close (within $20-30) to a used 4790k. Personally, I like the default clockspeed bump of the 4790k vs. the 4690k. Also, it's worth a little more when you sell the system down the road.
 
Depending on what you are going to do with it.....:)

I just went through an internal argument for the past few weeks on an i3 or i5. I ended up getting a low end i5 rather than a top tier i3, mainly for the extra cores.

My main PC is a 3930k, which I use mainly for gaming.....and now looking back, I could have saved some money and bought an i5 and used the money toward other parts.

Dont get me wrong, im still very satisfied with my 3930k....I just wont do it again whenever I build another "high end gaming system"
 
Get an i7. In well threaded programs, you can get about a 20% performance boost from HyperThreading.

This is coming from a programmer who has personally tested this with code.
 
chockomonkey said:
i5 doesn't have hyperthreading?
Click to expand...

No, that is the main difference between an i5 and i7 of the same generation.
HT can have negative consequences, making some games perform a little slower, but its easy enough to disable.
A few games benefit from HT.

Other differences are i7s are slightly faster default clock speed and have slightly more cache.
Once clocked, the differences are minimal for gaming.
 
The guy running Silicon Lottery says the i7 4790K generally overclocks higher than the i5 4690K, which is why he dropped binning the i5s.
 
Depends on budget and what your primary purpose is. The i7 is obviously faster but do you need HT and a higher clock speed? If just for gaming and on a limited budget then the i5 is perfectly fine. If you have a larger budget get the i7 but don't skimp on the GPU.
 
Climber said:
Depends on budget and what your primary purpose is. The i7 is obviously faster but do you need HT and a higher clock speed? If just for gaming and on a limited budget then the i5 is perfectly fine. If you have a larger budget get the i7 but don't skimp on the GPU.
Click to expand...

Note however that in soon to be coming DirectX 12 and new games based on it CPU performance will be playing significant role. So yes i5 is perfectly fine for the current games but i7 is much more future proof.
 
I got my i7 because at the time, it was only $50 more. Even then, I don't really need it, and should have just stuck with the 4670k I had. If you have other parts to get I would vote i5 and put the extra toward anything else (bigger ssd, better gpu, ...). Unless you do anything that will regularly use the HT, it's not really worth the premium as most games wont benefit from it.Sure, you might get a few extra fps, but putting $100 toward the gpu instead will result in a better net fps.
 
wirk said:
Note however that in soon to be coming DirectX 12 and new games based on it CPU performance will be playing significant role. So yes i5 is perfectly fine for the current games but i7 is much more future proof.
Click to expand...

I was unaware of that fact. so I'm more content with my i7 splurge now :D
 
wirk said:
Note however that in soon to be coming DirectX 12 and new games based on it CPU performance will be playing significant role. So yes i5 is perfectly fine for the current games but i7 is much more future proof.
Click to expand...

We've been saying that since DX9 and the gains have been minimal. As far as I'm aware the same looks to be true again with DX12. If on a limited budget it isn't worth sacrificing the overall performance for a minimal gain on the cpu performance. Just my two cents.
 
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