Price & performance - better buy i5 750 or i7 930?

[Misko195]

When we look price & performance, which CPU is better buy i5 750 or i7 930?

 

[warmon6]

it really depends on what your doing. between just those 2,

Core i5 750, better for gaming, web surfing, and other basic stuff.

Core i7 930, better for rendering, CAD, video editing/converting and other programs that need the memory bandwidth and/or the extra threads the 930 offers.

 

[sam_p_lay]

Worth pointing out there that you need a Core i7 if you want to use SLI/Crossfire with both cards running with 16x PCI-E channels. Unlike AMD systems, with Intel it's the CPU, not the chipset, that determines how many PCI-E lanes you have to play with.

On a Core i5, SLI/Crossfire will drop to 8x/8x and forget about 3-way. The performance loss of 8 lanes instead of 16 is not huge, 3-5% framerate loss typically (THG did an article on it a year or two back, you could search it), but personally I'd want every last FPS that my card is capable of!

Also, if you want to run your DDR3 in triple channel (giving a maximum bandwidth of 25.6gb/s), you'll need Core i7. These are the reasons I got my i7 920 (D0), and I haven't regretted it

 

[abhishekk89]

for any ordinary use like gaming, every day browsing, etc, to pack a better punch than a dual core i'd go with the i5...

for power users, who do encoding, high amounts of multitasking, tri-fire or tri-sli gaming setup i'd recommend a i7...

for a crossfire or sli an i5 will suffice for most cards... there's hardly 4-5% drop compared to x58 platform...

 

[Misko195]

Best answer selected by Misko195.