I5 vs, i7

The i7 series is more powerful than the i5 series.

Which is "right"? That's like asking which is the better tool, a screwdriver or a hammer. Depends.

i7.

Comparing an i5 760 with an i7 860, i guess the only difference is HT (absent in the i5 760) which is more or less irrelevant with the majority of the apps especially gaming..

I have an i5 and an i7. They are both Lynnfields at 2.8 GHZ. They both boot at exactly the same time. Unless you have a specific application that can take advantage of the i7's Hyperthreading I would save the money and go with the i5.

i overclocked my intel i5,750 to 3,6ghz. 200 multiply 18, and run at 38 degree idle, so thats very good, i have a msi mainbord, and 8gb ram. big cooler, hehe. ram frekvence 1200, at 1,30 volt. Modell P55A-G55(MS-7668). 8.GB Dubbel-Kanal DDR3 @ 598MHz (6-6-6-15) i5 is good as i7, just overclock alittle. i5 and i7 are made for do overclocking, and you save at least 130 usd.

It seems that the i7-930 can overclock a bit more than the i5-750. I think you can still save a bit of money buy going with the i5-750 though. Any of them can make a very powerful computer though.

thats ok, but its no problem to overclock i5 to 3.9 or 4,0, but set intel eist and c1e, and if you have turbo, put them on disable. and watch your ram, so you dont overclock,

What kind of applications can actually benefit from i7-860? You guys made me feel bad for buying that processor  

Scan this comparison of i5 760 vs i7 860 as a starting point to answer your question:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/108?vs=191

Generally speaking, it is better to buy an i5 vs an i7 because of the lack of programs that take advantage of HyperTheading.

For me, the only program that I use which takes advantage of HT is encoding videos using x.264 in Handbrake. I think the benchmarks I've looked at a while ago showed that an i7 was about 25% faster at video encoding than an i5 of the clock same speed.

Therefore, I need to determine if this 25% performance increase for Handbrake is worth the extra $75 - $100 for an i7 CPU over an i5 CPU.

Games do not benefit, and I actually recall a minor performance penalty with an i7 vs. an i5 of the same clock speed.