I5 or 955

[graniteman53]

Hello,
for the average guy who games now and then and does alot of photos on computer which one would be the best Jeff

 

[Guest]

This topic has been moved from the section Windows 7 to section CPU & Components by Grumpy9117

 

[ideal]

The 955 should work fine for what you will use it for.

 

[Mattz98]

??? For a price difference of about £20 ? Oh please.

i5 2500k is the best bang for the buck quad core period.

graniteman, i plead to you, get the i5 2500k.

the i5 2500k for about £20 more will give you overly significant more performance than the 955.

i'm not disrespecting the 955, 965, 975 or any of the phenom ii series, heck, even the hexacores!

in gaming, the faster your cpu can dispatch information, the very better. in alot of games when paired even a half decent gpu, if the gpu is getting all the information out just fine, but your cpu is struggling to keep up, you will experience bottlenecking. your game may begin to stutter, then matters get worse when your cpu begins to heat up , decreasing performance levels even lower.

When working with photos, the faster your cpu the better. You want to be able to have a boost in speed.. The i5 2500k is faster clock for clock already. They can overclock to 4.5Ghz STOCK COOLING! 5Ghz on better air coolers...

Technically the 955 will do "fine", yet not as good as an i5, and price gap isn't abnormal.

Go for the i5.

 

[simon12]

I agree the 2500K performance is massively better than the 955 but the processor price is £65 more and a motherboard capable of overclocking it is an extra £60 to making it £125 more. And as both posts stated the 955BE is fine for gaming unless you want to run 2 good graphics card or the best single card money can buy. If you can afford it without compromising on you graphics card the 2500K will be good for a few years longer than the 955BE though.

 

[Onus]

What games do you play? What type of photo editing do you do? If the former is mostly older titles, and the latter is not so much editing as managing a collection, you could "get away with" an Athlon II X3. If the games are recent CPU-intensive titles like Starcraft II, and you do professional-level photo editing, then you'll probably want that i5-2500K.
Consider also last generation's i5-760. If you want to look at CPU benchmarks to assist with your decision, look here: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2