I5 vs. i7

[bigred738]

I was just reading the forums on this site and i notiiced a lot of people building gaming machines were getting i5's. I was just wondering why everybody is suggesting i5 instead of i7?

 

[ares1214]

games cant really utilize the HT of the i7 series, they can barely utilize 4 cores, therefore from a gaming view, 4 cores @ 200$ @ 2.66 GHz > 4 cores @ 280$ ( plus mobo and RAM being more expensive) @2.66 GHz.

 

[bigred738]

So getting a i5 760 at 2.8GHz is better then getting a i7 860 at 2.8 GHz because the i5 is cheaper and game would only take full benifit from the i5 if i am reading that correctly.

 

[ares1214]

the 860 is better, however if your primary purpose is gaming, the 760 is a better buy. depending on if you plan to upgrade later on, or live near a microcenter, the AMD X4 955 or i7 930 are better buys respectively.

 

[geofelt]

So getting a i5 760 at 2.8GHz is better then getting a i7 860 at 2.8 GHz because the i5 is cheaper and game would only take full benifit from the i5 if i am reading that correctly.

Exactly.

For most gaming, plan on spending much more for your graphics card than for the CPU.

 

[DokkRokken]

More or less. The i7's have a feature called 'hyperthreading' which is useful for activities like encoding, but not for gaming.

 

[bigred738]

Thanks guys this is really going to save me money because I was going to spend most of my budget, which is still undecided, on a cpu, but now that i know that I can get an i5 insted of an i7 for a strictly gaming and web browsing machine I can use my money to buy things that are more important for gaming like graphics cards.

 

[bigred738]

Best answer selected by bigred738.