i5 vs i7

N

NetTechie

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 10, 2014
Messages
251
I googled around, but most of the articles are not recent. Does the i7 Haswell do more for gaming now, or is the hyperthreading not used in gaming. My primary concern is gaming.

Also, is the i7 more stable at higher temps than an i5? I checked and they are both rated the same it seems for maximum temps. But in practice?

Edit: I found an article on current processors, apparently there is no difference in performance for gaming.

http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1061&page=14

I guess my question remains about heat tolerance, is the i7 able to handle higher temps in practice?
 
Last edited:
its been shown that there is no difference in gaming. So i personally dont do it. for maybe the 2 fps you see its not worth +120 cost.
 
Well, at our local store it's an 80 dollar price difference. I do use photoshop, so it might come in handy for a few things I can think of.
 
NetTechie said:
Well, at our local store it's an 80 dollar price difference. I do use photoshop, so it might come in handy for a few things I can think of.
Click to expand...

If you do encoding, editing, or other intensive things, the i7 is worth the increase in price.
 
Generally speaking, you want hyperthreading turned OFF for gaming. The lack of HT is one of the big reasons why the i5 line is so popular for gaming PCs.
 
NetTechie said:
There is a way to turn it off? Is this in the bios, or in windows if so?
Click to expand...

Your BIOS should have an HT off setting. But having HT won't kill your gaming experience so I wouldn't go turning it off every time you want to play a game.
 
Would HT effect games like Call of Duty Ghosts or Battlefield 4? I've heard it can cause problems I guess.
 
BF4 its better to have on as BF4 and frostbite in general do scale with it, however there is plenty of older games that do not scale very well with HT and some that actually penalize by it being used, though as mentioned some programs say encoding decoding and the like that get a tremendous benefit by it being used.

As far as the question in regards to the temp the best example I can think of was with the i5 2500k and i7 2600k, both were very similar performance levels in nearly everything however the 2500k could generally hit higher clocks and be at cooler operating temperatures as it did not have the extra crap to worry about, it was just a fast quad core.

So is the i7 more stable at higher temps, I do not think this is quite the way to look at it, if it gets hotter quicker it would not be more stable but rather it would almost get in the way of itself, and haswell in general apparently stays quite cool until it reaches its peak clocks OR overclocked then they get quite hot.

I7 can have benefits in gaming BUT very few games take advantage of HT as most games in general do not take advantage of multi-core to begin with thank DX and other API partially for that.
 
check this review they show various games tested in HT on vs OFF.

in most games generally speaking HT do not show a decrease in performance with the exception of Crysis 3 which its really beneficial, battlefield 3 and battlefield 4 simply hate HT frostbite engine like real cores more than just hyperthreading. core unparking help in bf4 but with high clocks.. what i have to mention in this its that really depend on the GPU some time ago i had a 660TI SLI which really love to have HT on in battlefield 3. it seems that it really help with multi card setups but no in single card..

regarding temperatures, keeping HT off show a drop in temperatures from 5C up to 10C under high stress testing and heavy CPU loads, that allow to people can reach higher clocks with better temperatures than keeping it enabled. i've tested that many times in all my i7 rigs, the more dramatic decrease in temps was on the time of my i7 950. for overclockers its great due to they have to use less voltage to reach desired speeds, however in ivy bridge and haswell this have less impact due to the poor heat transfer from the CPU die to the heatsink, this cause high temps regardless have hyperthreading on vs off, many people with haswell have found to reach better clocks with better stability on i7s haswell than i5 haswell but i think its all thing of silicon lottery.. some are simply good overclockers some are just crappy.
 
evilsofa said:
Generally speaking, you want hyperthreading turned OFF for gaming. The lack of HT is one of the big reasons why the i5 line is so popular for gaming PCs.
Click to expand...

We are not in the Pentium 4 days.. and even then, HT helped some.

Yes, I have done testing.

Also, for those games that have "issues" with HT enabled, disabling "core parking" in Windows pretty much takes care of it.
 
So if I get an i7, and running a single video card, HT wont cause problems? Just multiple gpu's?
 
There's no issues with HT anyhow... I run the core unparking App and gained performance in BF4. So go with the i7, it's a monster :)
 
evilsofa said:
The lack of HT is one of the big reasons why the i5 line is so popular for gaming PCs.
Click to expand...
The lack of HT on i5's has nothing to do with why they are so popular for gaming PCs.

It has to do with the fact that 99% of the time you will get identical performance for a $100 less which can be put into a better video card. The few times you will see a performance increase doesn't justify the increase in price for most gamers.
 
Greetings

Interesting question by the OP as its gets even more interesting if you throw a hexacore cpu into the mix and consider that with HT on and off as all hexacores do have HT available, there's a review here where minimum frame rates for BF3 go up significantly where you use 6 cores with HT off and this was in a discussion about using a 4820K, anyway a comment was posted about the review stating that the original reviewer may be comparing apples to oranges as the runs may not have been replicated exactly leading to different outcomes, the reply post to my comment is here but I suggest you read both the entire review and the entire thread and make up your own minds, although I presume a hexacore would be much better for photoshop use.

Other than this all I can add is that given both new consoles are 8 core cpu's then presumably any future console ports over to PC's will probably be quite happy to use 8 cpu cores as well, there have been some discussions on the net about I7 cpu's running BF4 better and smoother but only when the PC has two video cards so probably from a future proofing scenario an I7 might be the way to go, unless of course you conclude that an I7 hexacore CPU is even better still.

May we all live in interesting times.

Cheers
 
OMG! I wish they would stop referencing the whole cores thing as they do not perform like 8 cores, there is a reason why Intel is calling their chips dual, quad, and 6 core WITH HT cause that's what it is.

Anyways.
 
NetTechie said:
Would HT effect games like Call of Duty Ghosts or Battlefield 4? I've heard it can cause problems I guess.
Click to expand...


Battlefield 4 might be on of the few newer games that HT may show improvement in performance. The difference between HT on/off is usually a modest 10% gain or loss max in gaming. Outside of gaming it's about 10-15% boost for each core (encoding) so the difference is huge and worth a few sheckles more. Having it turned on was a pretty big deal back in the single-core P4 days. You were literally losing upwards of 50% performance because 99.9% of everything was single-threaded. With quad-cores and beyond it's becoming less of a noticeable issue, although still there for the bleeding edge gamer that cares about a couple FPS.
 
evilsofa said:
Generally speaking, you want hyperthreading turned OFF for gaming. The lack of HT is one of the big reasons why the i5 line is so popular for gaming PCs.
Click to expand...

Negative. The $100 price difference is why it's so popular. I assure you, if it were the same price, gamers would buy the i7.

As far as HT and gaming, the results range from A tiny performance hit, to no difference to a small performance bump.
 
There is a lot worse scaling seen with hyperthreading on the core i7 versus the core i3. This has to do with the L3/main memory bandwidth available per-core (twice as much on the i3). This can cause spotty scaling (much more dependent on type of load), and can also result in NONE OR NEGATIVE performance gain.

This is why I recommend the core i5 for generic loads. You need very specific processing (L2 friendly) to see a significant gain.
 
I use it on my i7-930 and I am on windows 8.1 /64bit which is paired up with a R9-290 and BF 4 is darn smooth with HT on ..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top