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Is the price premium for an i7 worth it for me?

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  • Intel i7
  • CPUs
Last response: in CPUs
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October 1, 2014 12:38:23 AM

I'm trying to decide whether to pay the extra 100$ for an i7 4790k, as opposed to the more affordable i5 4690k. I know this is very subjective, so here are a few usage cases:

- I game, a lot. I know for gaming the price premium for the i7 simply isn't worth the extra 2-3 fps I might get, and most games simply don't take advantage of more than 2 or 3 cores.

- I plan to use this chip for a very long time. Like, 5 years from now, I plan to still be using it. With the new consoles out, more developers are going to be utilizing more and more cores, so the addition of hyperthreading might make the i7 more future-proof.

- I almost never have just one program running at once. Even when I'm gaming, I'm running a browser with a dozen tabs, 3 chat clients, and a music player.

- I'm a college student and software engineer. I frequently have a compiler or IDE running, and how long it takes for me to compile a program matters. My compiler of choice is g++ (mingw) if that matters.

- Part of the software that I write is multithreaded, and I need to be able to prepare for systems with not 2, not 4, not 8, but N cores, and scale properly according to the hardware (a multi-cpu server being a common example of such hardware). I suspect that having the i7's 8 hardware threads instead of the i5's 4 might make it easier for me to learn how to spread jobs across many threads.

Given the above information, would you say that an i7 is worth the extra 100$ for me?

More about : price premium worth

a b à CPUs
October 1, 2014 12:41:27 AM

Yes!
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a b à CPUs
October 1, 2014 1:21:50 AM

You kinda answered your own question when you mentioned longevity and multi-threaded performance being of importance all in one post.
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a c 192 à CPUs
October 1, 2014 1:22:10 AM

the i7 4790k is even worth it over the 4790, stock out of the box it is already clocked at 4Ghz.

In the long run, you'll see the i7 be in the lead in gaming over the i5. As of now, the i5 and i7 are quite close, but as heavy threads are becoming more and more, 6 will no longer be the common medium.

"hardware threads instead of the i5's 4" all the i5's has 6 threads.

Hyperthreading just splits the cores up which uses them more effectively, though it does not make much of a difference when gaming.

For your uses, the i7 4790k and a good SSD would be the perfect combination for your system, as you want to compile as fast as possible.
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