I5 2300 or i5 2500?

The i5 2500 would be regarded as the better chip because of its higer clock speed.

33 or 3.3ghz=3300mhz is the clock speed of the cpu this is obviously quicker than the 28 or 2.8ghz=2800mhz.

If you don't need the extra speed and the i5-2300 is cheaper then go for that otherwise get the i5-2500.

For $15 more or so, the 2500K is your best bet. Easy overclock to 4.4 ghz+ on air

No one has yet answered the actual question...

What is the bus/clock ratio, and how does it work. I've read a few other topics on here dealing with it, but I cannot really understand what this is.

In laymans terms, how does the bus/clock ratio affect the performance of a PC when related to pure computational ability (in applications such as 3D rendering programs and audio production, sampling, etc.)? Specifically, if the 2300 has a bus/clock ratio of 28 and the 2500 one of 33. What do these numbers mean?

beanoslim just told you what the bus/core ratio is...

The internal clock of the CPU is at 100 Mhz, and everything (almost) runs at multiples of that base clock (or bclk). The bus/core ratio (or CPU mulitplier) of the 2300 is locked at 28, and it is locked at 33 for the 2500.

100 MHz x 28 = 2.8 GHz and 100 MHz x 33 = 3.3 GHz.

The 2300 is no way, shape, or form better than the 2500. Whoever told you that is a fool and should not be giving out hardware advice.

The 2500k has an unlocked CPU mulitplier which allows you to OC the chip to much higher frequencies. For an extra few bucks it is well worth it, just make sure to get a mobo with the P67 chipset to allow OCing.

Well if the person doesn't not intend to overclock then why THE HELL get the unlocked chips. And not getting the unlocked chips means not getting the P67 mother boards which are quite considerably more expensive than the H67 (at least in Australia). So to sum it up, if you are a light gamer, getting those locked chips are more than enough for your need and you can reduce the cost by quite a substantial amount.

People are saying to get the unlocked chips just for a few more dollars, but they dont realise that getting the chips would mean having to buy the more expensive p67 mobos.

All systems are based on a certain base clock speed. Every chip on the mainboard runs on a multiplier of this base clock speed. For Sandy Bridge, the base clock speed is 100MHz and the CPUs use a large multiplier to arrive at their final clock speed. Other CPU types might use a 133MHz or a 200MHz base clock speed, but they still use big multipliers to arrive at their final CPU speed.

The bus/clock ratio is really only important when overclocking other older types of CPU. Sandy Bridge doesn't overclock the old way.

An i5-2500 processor will chew up an i5-2300 processor, swallow it, and crap it out the other end. Whoever told you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about.

The K-type Sandy Bridge chips are good for overclocking, but even the normal versions are more than fast enough for all of today's and tomorrow's applications and games. We like to use and recommend the K-types here just because this is an enthusiast forum, and we do all kinds of overclocking.

Thanks for all the answers, I feel like a bit of a nonce, but at least I get it now.

For the record, I did always think there was no comparison between the two.