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i5 vs i7

T

Talic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
177
First thing I'll like to mention is I'm a casual folder, I only leave a machine folding overnight once or twice a week. I usually do most of my folding while using my machine for regular computer stuff and only pausing it for a game or something where I need to use the cpu cycles.

That comes up to my main question, how much of a advantage would be a i7 be against a i5 when sandybridge comes out? Would I notice any differences with HT and my "casual" folding habits? I'll probably be running a smp client on my rig while using it without any gpu client since I'm using a amd gpu right now but I'm open open for getting a 570 or the future 470 sometime in the future.

Right now I'm more on the side of saving money and getting a i5 with a nvidia gpu later on, what do you guys say about this? I'm not much of a overclocker right now (gasp) since my E6700 has a fit whenever I try it.
 
i'd go with the i5 750 and overclock the snot out of it. the i5/i7's are much easier to overclock then that E6700.
 
i7, it is a nice bump in speed with folding. Also if you hold onto your systems for a while the i7 will last ya longer with the added threads.
 
I sold my i5 and bought an i7 to replace it after only a couple months. The 8 threads are much better for folding and barley use any more power than an i5 whereas a GPU adds much more power for only 10-15k ppd. I'll post what my bigadv ppd is when I disable HT on my CPU after I get home today because I'm interested too.
 
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Talic said:
That comes up to my main question, how much of a advantage would be a i7 be against a i5 when sandybridge comes out? Would I notice any differences with HT and my "casual" folding habits?
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Unless you really really want to get into the hobby, I would keep what you have now. If you want to go from your dual to a quad because your cpu is not beefy enough, then by all means get an i5 or i7. Assuming you're talking about P55 regarding i7s then the only choice would be the i7 8 series (860 or 870, no sense in paying for unlocked 875k if you're not going to oc it) because otherwise you will have no HT. (ie with the i7 750 which has no HT)

Regarding SB and where things go from there is really anyone's guess. SB will only have a few cpus that can be overclocked, the rest will be locked. They reportedly will oc higher than Nehalems, but again since oc is low on your list of wants/needs, it would be sorta a moot point in your case. From a performance standpoint, sure SB will be a better stock clock performance solution than a Nehalem, so that may be something you would want to consider. If you do decide to try out overclocking, the gap between the two becomes a bit more narrow and a Nehalem cpu wouldn't be a bad choice at all.

You really have to decide what you want to do before making the first step. You can either decide to build a -bigadv system, or do a gpu-centric system. Being that you only fold very occasionally, going -bigadv would be rather pointless. Short of going far out and getting an SR-2 like the rest of us loons :D (and dropping a -bigadv in a day) you're going to need 2 1/2 to 3 days for a -bigadv to finish processing on any regular HT enabled i7 oc'd to 3.6ghz or higher. Then again if you're not oc'ing whatever you get, you probably wouldn't make the deadline anyway.

If I were you - I'd keep what you have, upgrade the gpu (and psu if you need it), and run the gpu client. ;) You can cut through quite a few WUs on a gpu in a single day, and IMHO that better fits your parameters. On the cpu side if you do regular WU you could get something like a 6701 which will really muck up your cpu; 6701's take over 2 days on my stock e8400 and roughly a day to a day and a half on my q9450@3.6ghz. Point being - you'd be better off running the gpu client.

Zink said:
I'll post what my bigadv ppd is when I disable HT on my CPU after I get home today because I'm interested too.
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Do not do that. ;) If you disable HT and then start the client again while it's running a -bigadv (which has an 8 core/thread minimum requirement), the client will only detect 4 cores without HT, which will more than likely throw up an error saying you don't have enough cores and send back the work it's done already. (giving you no credit)
 
How much cpu utilization does the smp client have on a quad core system? Does it scale with the additional threads of a HT system? If it only uses 2 or 3 cores at a time then I'll probably just go with a i5 and see if I can get one of the unlocked sandybridge that are supposed to be released at the same time. Right now I just use the regular cpu client and it uses just one core which is fine since I'm usually do other things with it.

I'm running into a wall in terms of processing power I need so I do need to upgrade my system, even when I do pause my folding client, so yeah I do need a new system. This machine is almost 4 years old since I got it right when Intel released their Core 2 Duo.

As for running the -bigadv client, no thanks, you guys can take care of that ;)

I looked up the estimated costs of SB and the i7 going to be around 140 dollars more than the i5, which is going to be around the 200 dollar range. This article is where I'm getting that info: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3871/the-sandy-bridge-preview-three-wins-in-a-row
 
zero2dash said:
Do not do that. ;) If you disable HT and then start the client again while it's running a -bigadv (which has an 8 core/thread minimum requirement), the client will only detect 4 cores without HT, which will more than likely throw up an error saying you don't have enough cores and send back the work it's done already. (giving you no credit)
Click to expand...


You're right, I took of the bigadv switch for now because I wan't to see the difference once I get a standard SMP.
 
The SMP client will use all available cores/threads, so it will use all 8 threads on a quad i7 with hyperthreading. It runs at low priority so that any other applications will be able to use the CPU when they need it.
 
i5 smp 4 core around 8k give or take, -bigadv 8 core i7 (4+4ht) around 27k-50k


no comparison at all, you can still use a big adv machine as long as your clock speeds are good enough. no harm in leaving the machine on 24/7.

the i5 sandy's (regular 4 cores or 2 core with h/t) look to be about on par with non h/t enabled current i7's. current i7's seem a little better when it comes to memory band with limited applications. applications that take advantage of multi core like winrar will of course be faster by around 30% with the i7's. may not seem like much but it can make a 10 minutes rar file unzip in 7 min, pretty big gain.
 
How strict is the due time for big adv? I'm going to be using this machine a gaming machine so I decide to play on it I'm going to need pause it.

Is 7zip as multithreaded as winrar? I never cared for paying or using expired version of winrar when 7zip does the same thing.
 
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