i7 future proof

Games are not using HT, it dosnt help at all. When i5 becomes obsolete i7 will be too, its a quad core after all.

i7 = streaming, video editing
i5 = gaming

I'd just save the extra $100 and get the i5 4690k for mostly gaming purposes.

Considering that both "next-gen" consoles use AMD chips, and that most games we see as PC-gamers at the moment are ported from those platforms, I don't think Hyper Threading will be utilized a lot in future games.

I could be wrong though, but for gaming I think a i5 will be quite future proof, even though that phrase doesn't really make sense, since hardware ages poorly.

The best thing to do is get a I5 K series (unlocked) with a Z series MB and when the card starts to show its age and not keeping up as fast as it should then overclock it. Like Undying89 said a I5 is perfect for gaming and no games utilize HT.

Eh, how incredibly wrong.
It's true that a haswell i7 doesn't offer much better performance than a Haswell i5, but that's right now. If the game uses more than 4 threads it also automatically uses the HT of the i7.

Yes it's more future proof, in 5 years there will be more demanding games out and many of them will use more than 4 threads. Realistically you would be looking at a year or two of a longer lifetime with the i7. If you think that's worth an extra hundred bucks then you might as well buy the i7.

Dragon age inquisition and Battlefield 4 are a couple of examples that do run better on an i7.

Not really. Does i7 920 with 8 threads perform better than i5 4690k? No. Core clock and singlethreaded performance is still the king. Haswell-E with 6-8 cores are different story though but 4790k is just a quad core.

Like i said, HT isnt helping in game and i7 isnt worth 100$ more.

Are you seriously comparing a almost 7 years old cpu to a brand new one?
Obviously the haswell will be better as it has much more advanced architecture.
Compare an i7 920 to a i5 760 in for example DA:Inquisition and look at the huge difference.
You will not see a difference between the hasswell i5 and i7 in the games that are out right now, but that's not what the op was asking either.
The impact of HT in games can be observed in benchmarks featuring a pentium and an i3, as both are dual cores but only one has HT.
I suggest you do some research on the matter as you obviously have no clue how HT works..

I would love to see results between a pentium & I3 for gaming. Theres an interesting forum about disabling HT for gaming and cecilkorik from that forum made an excellent point about HT in gaming. I will post the original link below.

"What most games need is single-process, single-thread, single-core performance to be maxed out. Hyperthreading does the opposite.
What hyperthreading does is attempt to balance 1 core between two different threads/processes, so it gives you 2 "virtual" cores for every actual core.
The idea behind hyperthreading is that there may be occasional times when 1 physical core actually can do 2 things at once for 2 different threads, for example if one thread is keeping the core busy with some memory accesses while the other thread is trying to get the core to multiply some numbers, the one actual core can probably handle doing both those things at once. Kinda-sorta.
By making the same core available to both processes at once through hyperthreading's 2 virtual cores, it might offer a bit of extra performance for that scenario. As a result, you get a small performance boost (in normal usage). However for most scenarios all it's really doing is giving half of the core's time to one process, and half to the other.
Why you don't want it for gaming is because games don't do that, it is very difficult to split the game logic across multiple cores. They typically have one process, and typically only one thread that matters. You want 100% of the core's processing time devoted to that thread, without exception. No sharing, no hyperthreading. For the game, nothing else really matters. You don't care that your computer's overall performance would be slightly higher with hyperthreading because the "overall performance" includes a lot of things you don't care about and it comes at the cost of the one thing that you DO care about: the game. You don't care that a Windows Update check happened a fraction of a second faster because it was able to do a few extra operations on the same core your game is using."

http://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/2hti6m/why_does_disabling_hyperthreading_supposedly_give/

Although I suppose if your running multiple applications (HWmonitor/FRAPS/Nvidia Shadowplay) in the backround as well as the game itself an I7 may be a better choice.

Games use threads.

Take an i3 (two cores + HT) and an i5 (four cores). From a game's point of view it would just know that it can run up to four threads. The OS scheduler sorts out the threads between the various cores (be they real or logical). The disadvantage of HT compared to real cores is that threads can sometimes get in each other's way, so in that sense some games may be written to 'use' HT in the sense that they've been written to try and avoid that. But a game written to use more than two threads when available will generally run better on an i3 than a dual core even if that code wasn't specifically written to pay attention to HT.

Now four-core processors are becoming the norm, there are plenty of games that use three or four threads (and FC4 apparently demands at least three). What very few games appear to use is more than four threads. So the i3 performs better than the Pentium (having four logical processors vs two), the i5 performs better than the i3 (having four real processors over two real + two virtual) but the i7 doesn't really peform better because the software's not asking for the extra processing of the HT. Example benchmarks are in this article that clearly show an increase in performance with HT on an i3 but not an i7.

To answer the OP, whether the i7 has better longevity than the i5 is dependent on whether games start to call on more than four threads and whether (by the time they do so) the CPUs of the time are vastly better than the current or not. Personally I would say if an i7 is easily affordable to you then it won't hurt to have it, but if you dislike paying the price of an i7 then don't feel obliged to - chances are better than evens that by the time the i7 is good and the i5 not, you'll rather upgrade wholesale anyway.

The key word here is "most games", most games are still single threaded, very few use more than 4 threads.
I myself have an older i7 920 @4.3ghz, while it still performs well in games, disabling HT in DA:Inquisition makes it completely unplayable in some areas.
Games are becoming more multi threaded, That is a fact.

I do think that hasswel owners in, let's say 5 years, will be in a similar situation.

Reagarding i3 vs pentiums, games like far cry 4 and DA:Inquisition refuse to even start with the pentium, while they run fine with an i3. The only difefrence between the two is HT.

I found a article that test a Pentium, I3, I5, I7's. And it seems like for the most part there isn't much of a difference between them on the same setup and only a few games (Crysis 3/Batman:AOrigins/BF4) will utilize the extra cores/threads based on the programing. Its a really good read for those who are interested:

http://techbuyersguru.com/haswellgaming.php

Another game that uses HT is Planetside 2. I was playing it before and I noticed it was using 5 out of 8 threads of my i7. I personally choose the most powerful CPU I can due to the fact that IF I need it, it's there.

I've heard this kind of argument before, but it makes no sense at all to me, though perhaps my understanding of how threads and processes work isn't as extensive as it might be.

Every program you have running is a thread. For thirty years now, Windows and the like has allowed 'multitasking' where multiple programs appear to run concurrently, by using the OS scheduler to assign processor time to threads. 'Do T1 for a bit, now stop. Now T2 for a bit, now stop. T1 a bit more, stop, T3 now...' and so on.

Back in the days of single core, single processor systems, this is how a computer could run Windows and a game at the same time. A game never did get '100% of the core's processing time without exception' which was why for best performance you'd always try and limit the number of processes running in the background - because they were processes that would keep interrupting the one that you wanted running the most. If Task Manager ever listed 100% for a process, it was more down to estimation than actuality.

When two cores available, does the OS scheduler really decide to devote one of them to a game, with no interruption whatsoever? If it's clever enough to do that, why would it not be clever enough to do the same even with HT enabled? Alternatively, if it didn't devote a core purely to a game, threads related to that game will get interrupted more than if HT were present. Either way, it's unclear how turning off HT is supposed to give the game any more processor time, let alone 100% without exception.

'100% usage aside', does HT cause a performance drop? It seems like a historical memory more than anything current. Reading around, in the early days it definitely did for certain tasks on the Pentium 4 Northwood due to something called Replay. Article here. Prescott seemed to alleviate it, but either way this is all on the NetBurst architechture - I can't find anything to say that Core uses Replay at all.

Some testing on an i7-3 here:

As you can see their are a few applications that perform marginally better, to the tune of one to two percent, with Hyper-Threading disabled. But at the same time there is far more to be gained in terms of performance from leaving Hyper-Threading enabled than there is to be gained from disabling it...At this point I think it’s fair to say that the days of fear mongering over performance hits due to Hyper-Threading are well past their “best if used by” dates. The implementation of this technology found in Ivy Bridge processors, and to a large extent in Sandy Bridge processors, is quite robust and well adapted to our current crop of OS schedulers.

Click to expand...

The gaming benchmarks tend to show either equal or far greater peformance of an i3+HT over a Pentium-G. There may be certain setups where it leads to a small % decrease in certain games, but overall the idea that hyperthreading should be disabled because it leads to performance hits is somewhat out of date.

If we look at task manager it seems there are many processes running, but many more threads.
Even if a game isn't multi-threaded, all the other process and their threads that are running can
still take advantage of hyperthreading. One advantage I've read about hyperthreading is that it's
possible to switch between threads on the same core without a context switch (which involves
swapping out the register states and memory address space), which is much faster and more efficient.
I've read there already is a game that is designed to use 5 independent processes. Since modern consoles have 8 cores, multi-threaded, multi-process AAA games are going to be the norm, not the exception.

Also the fact that if the person didn't know much about overclocking or just didn't want to overclock you have a 500mhz advantage on the i7 over the i5 now which is a big deal in alot of cases.

I just read another article (I think it was on anandtech) that had some benchmarks that showed reduced performance when using hyperthreading. It was only on two games out of six though (one of which was based on the Unreal 3 engine) and on two other games there was a noticeable improvement in performance (particularly with Crysis 3). The other 4 games showed no difference either way.