Need Help With First Build

[DarkStar_WNY]

Sorry I posted my original thread in this subforum by mistake and made a new one in the correct spot and decided to delete everything but the question that applies to this subforum.

Tonight or tomorrow I am going to be ordering components to build my son a new computer. It's main purpose will be gaming, although he occasionally does some minor editing of game videos and such that he shares with his friends. Also of course I'll be setting up a Folding client on it.

I was originally planning on getting an i5-3570k CPU, but the i7-3770 is only $80 USD more, and the i7-3770K is only $110 more then the i5 chip so I'm wondering if the upgrade would be worth it?

We will likely experiment with overclocking some, but nothing real major, basically just teaching my son the basics (largely because I only really know the basics myself. lol!)

 

[defaultluser]

If you plan on overclocking AT ALL you want to get a chip with a K designation.

The i7-3770 is limited unlocked, but this basically means you can bump the turbo clock speed 400 MHz. You'd be incredibly limited by this, as even a casual overclock of Ivy Bridge can get you twice that speed improvement.

If you plan on running FAH, definitely go for the i7 over the i5. The four extra threads will be put to good use, usually yielding %75-100 more points over an i5 processor.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

The biggest difference between the Intel® Core™ i5-3570K and the Intel Core i7-3770K comes down to hyper-threading. Based on what you are going to be doing with the computer let you know that the Intel Core i7 is worth it to you. If you are doing general computer applications, office or gaming you most likely find that the Intel Core i5 is the best for you. However if you are going to be doing some media creation work like Adobe CS or another video editing software, running a 4 or more VMs, and other applications like this then the Intel Core i7 would be the best answer for your needs.

So you will most likely get the best value out of an Intel Core i5-3570K and a small SSD then you would get out of an Intel Core i7-3770K.

 

[defaultluser]

So you will most likely get the best value out of an Intel Core i5-3570K and a small SSD then you would get out of an Intel Core i7-3770K.

Here we disagree. If the box is going to be used for 24/7 folding (FAH), and DarkStar_WNY CARES about his points per day (PPD), he would be foolish to not spend the extra cash on the i7.

The point calculations for work unit completion time is non-linear (because faster results are more useful to researchers), which is why you get double the points for a %30 speedup. Given the total cost of the system, 90 bucks is a small price to pay if you care about points.

If he doesn't care about FAH points, and just wants a powerful system that can fold on the side, then I'll agree with you.

 

[DarkStar_WNY]

Well I care about points and do what I can to up them, but as this will be my third rig running the client (a OC'ed i7-930 and a laptop with a 2.26GHz core 2 duo) I'm not sure if I'm willing to spend an extra $100 bucks to increase my points further, although if it would help in gaming at all I wouldn't mind the extra cost.

I only started folding folding again when I for the i7-930 system, so I'm only at around 23M points which is nothing to write home about.