i7 vs i5 vs AMD

[tubaloth]

Its been a couple of years sense I built my computer, and recently my brother-in-law was considering building one. I was trying to explain (what I knew) of the new Intel Processors and tried not to drool to much.

That got me thinking of what is the difference between i5 chips and i7.

I quick google search seems like i7 does have Hyper-threading where as i5 doesn't (and probably won't).

It also seems like i5 comes in dual or quad core, where as i7 is all quad?

Is that the main difference?


With that in mind then, besides things like turbo boost, are some of the quad core AMD's comparable to the i5's? I don't know of any AMD quad cores that have hyper threading?

Thanks

 

[p4nz3rm4d]

just wait for the next gen of CPU's in my words. I would wait for Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer to come out before I make a decision.

 

[hunter315]

You got the main differences covered, one other thing is that the lower end i5s the dual cores with hyper threading, have graphics built in which can be good for low end computers that dont need a full GPU.

No AMD quads have Hyper threading, thats an intel only thing. How they compare really depends what you are doing with the system. If you are gaming then a Phenom II 955, i5 750, and i7 930 will all perform similarly with a single GPU setup, if you are only a budget an Athlon II x4 630 will perform only a bit slower(gaming tends not to be CPU limited)

If you are doing video editing AMD has 6 cores that perform a little closer but an i7 will tend to best the AMD CPUs in highly threaded applications, in apps that only need 4 cores they tend to perform similarly.

 

[tubaloth]

Thanks,

With an i5 Dual Core, is there much Turbo Boost with that? I can see not using 4 cores, but I would I would think most windows 7 programs (or windows 7 itself) can use two cores and would never need to turn off 1 core)