Official GIGABYTE Forum
Questions about GIGABYTE products => Motherboards with Intel processors => Topic started by: Dark Mantis on May 07, 2011, 02:48:33 pm
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Out of interest I was wondering what the general consensus of opinion was between the value of these two CPUs.
The i5 is four cores but each is only single threaded whereas the i7 is four cores but multithreaded. However the i7 is also about 50% more expensive than the i5.
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One of the main reason I didn't buy the i7 was of course money. Other than that I figured I really won't ever be taking full advantage of the mulithreaded cores to actually justify the costs.
The most cpu intense tasks I do are gaming, and most of the times they are older games I buy cheap at steam when they have their awesome sales (like yesterday's Crysis max edition for $10)
I also don't play much so in the end I guess the i5 works just fine for what I need.
I've also run VMware and instances of linux and the i5 seems to be handling that superbly. I'm sure the i7 is a lot better than the i5 at certain things but until I need that capability the i5 is more than enough.
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For the money, and since you mention value, I voted for the 2500K
2600K is really overpriced I think, it should only be $50 or so more, not $100+
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Depends what you are using it for. 8 threads + fast RAM + overclocking makes BIG difference in some applications.
I personally have seen 30-50% performance increase in professional video encoding software with 2600K@4.7GHz + SSD and 2500K@5GHz + HDD. Yeah, I know, SSD vs HDD, but I doubt it made all that performance increase.
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All Very valid Points,...In a black and white world ... if bucks are the main issue you buy what you can afford, ... if bucks are not an issue, you buy what you want!
But what about the shades of grey of cost verses price !!! If you go the 2500, it'll do everything the 2600 will do, just not as quick, that's the price you pay. With the 2600 it'll do everything the i5 can do and a tad quicker....over the next couple of years multi threaded apps will hit there stride, more cores will be more beneficial then raw speed, yes, eventually even in games!....and yes! at the moment it depends what you use it for, "At The Moment". We have so much choice right now that one can quite cost effectively buy chip specific.......... hardware to suit the type of application your going to play with and will do the job close or just as well as a chip twice the price. but hear is the cost effective catch,...if you buy the pricier option it will do everything better/faster/quicker.
I remember when dual core hit the market......Wow, two cores on one die! everybody did a double take because we had a 2.4Ghz (Dual core) out performing a 3.6Ghz single core by a belting big margin. (yeh right, maybe not in games you say)....Huh! people were saying how can this be, Intel and AMD have been telling us for years it's all about raw speed!
I still have mates who swear by there single core game Riggs (very old big kids) but if you want to play a game,run a virus scan while downloading a movie, ... a few more cores helps. Half a decade ago to even ask a question like this would have seemed bazaar.......Mmmmmmmmmmmm should I buy "A" with one core or"B" with 8 cores, Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm!...........Bit of a no brainer for me, ... Sell the dog , shoot the cat...... claim the insurance ... buy the i7
Aussie Allan
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I take it that you can't multi task then Allan as you didn't vote in the poll and after all the discussion we had about voting! ;)
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Sadly I tasked it but the other core let me down!!!!!!...do I have to do everything myself?....You know to tell the truth I didn't even see it first time round.....I voted 9 times to make up for my mistake!
Aussie Allan