Current CPU options for a continuously updated machine

[Shahmatt]

Hi all, I am currently using a single core Intel CPU that's about 6 years old. I haven't upgraded because of the high initial investment I made on this machine during that time. This made me reluctant to buy new until now.

It's obviously time to change, technology has moved so fast. I was thinking of going with a mid-range setup but slightly budget end on the processor side. My plan was to upgrade CPU, or CPU+MB more regularly from now onwards. Perhaps every 2 to 3 years. In this way I hope to keep up with technology.

I am debating between the i5-2300, i3-2120 and the i3-2100. I am considering AMD as well.

The i5-2300 is around 58 USD more than the i3-2120, which is in turn around 30USD more than the 2100.

Ideally speaking the 2120 is about the price range I'm looking for.

The i5 is more desirable than the i3 because of the four cores, but I've been reading that most applications don't use 4 cores yet and that 2 cores is enough for now, especially for games.

I have three questions.
1. Is going with 2 cores folly with upcoming news of games and software?

2. If indeed I decide to go with 2 cores, would it be better to buy the 2120? Or will I get the same effect by buying a 2100 and overclocking it? Will overclocking a 2100 increase its power consumption significantly over the 65W TDP?

3. AMD is appealing to me because of their longer lasting chipsets. This would mean that even if I buy the relatively worse performing X4-955 for example, I could perhaps manage for about 2 years and then buy Bulldozer by replacing only CPU and saving in the long term. Does my rationale make sense?

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Just to help you in your comparison you can see the differences between these processors at this site http://ark.intel.com/compare/52206,53422,53426. Now to clear a couple things up for you, right now very few games can take advantage of more than 3 threads and even they do you aren’t getting a lot of performance increase out of it. So for the game alone 2 or 3 threads of support is all you need. Now you may need additional threads of support add-ins or other applications that you may use like TeamSpeak or Ventrillo. So now the Intel® Core™ i3-2100 and Intel Core i3-2120 are dual core processors that have hyper-threading which means that you can run up to 4 threads at the same time. Granted threads 3 and 4 (from hyper-threading) won’t have the performance that the first two cores do but they can still help.

Now overclocking on any of these 3 processors will be hard and only give limited performance increases. If you are looking into overclocking then most likely you are going to want to focus on the Intel Core i5-2500K and the Intel Core i7-2600K because of their unlocked multiplier these are the processors for overclocking.

Staying with the same socket it really nice we have socket 775 for years. The problem with locking yourself into a socket is that you may have problems dealing with newer technologies when you are locked into a socket. If we hadn’t changed from 775 to 1156 we would have never been able to integrate the memory controller onto the processor. So we do try to limit the number of sockets that we use, we do need to be will to change them to keep up with new technologies as they emerge.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[Shahmatt]

Just to help you in your comparison you can see the differences between these processors at this site http://ark.intel.com/compare/52206,53422,53426. Now to clear a couple things up for you, right now very few games can take advantage of more than 3 threads and even they do you aren’t getting a lot of performance increase out of it. So for the game alone 2 or 3 threads of support is all you need. Now you may need additional threads of support add-ins or other applications that you may use like TeamSpeak or Ventrillo. So now the Intel® Core™ i3-2100 and Intel Core i3-2120 are dual core processors that have hyper-threading which means that you can run up to 4 threads at the same time. Granted threads 3 and 4 (from hyper-threading) won’t have the performance that the first two cores do but they can still help.

Now overclocking on any of these 3 processors will be hard and only give limited performance increases. If you are looking into overclocking then most likely you are going to want to focus on the Intel Core i5-2500K and the Intel Core i7-2600K because of their unlocked multiplier these are the processors for overclocking.

Staying with the same socket it really nice we have socket 775 for years. The problem with locking yourself into a socket is that you may have problems dealing with newer technologies when you are locked into a socket. If we hadn’t changed from 775 to 1156 we would have never been able to integrate the memory controller onto the processor. So we do try to limit the number of sockets that we use, we do need to be will to change them to keep up with new technologies as they emerge.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

Ok thanks for the useful info. So the dual cores with HT may be good enough.

I understand that overclocking a processor with a locked multiplier is hard. However could I please know if 2120 speeds are achievable by the limited overclocking of the 2100.

I know the 775 platform lasted a long time. Do you think the 1155 chipset will have an equally long lifetime or is it impossible to say?

 

[sykozis]

What games are you looking to play? What graphics card are you going to be using?

 

[Shahmatt]

I have already made a purchase actually.

I went with the i3-2100 with Biostar Z68A+ board.

My rationale for the CPU is as follows:

1. I believe the 2100 would have sufficient processing power for me right now - even my old Pentium 4 chip has been good for so long and I think modern day Atom chips are still faster than the old Pentium 4's. I have decided to use the savings on a SSD since disk access speeds seem to be a real bottleneck. I have not purchased this yet though.

2. I've read some preliminary information that Ivy Bridge may be socket 1155 compliant. Therefore I could perhaps, in two or three years time, dump my 2100 for a quad core Ivy Bridge chip. This may be a more reasonable time to go quad core. Even if Ivy Bridge doesn't work a 2600K would perhaps be much cheaper and a decent upgrade at this time.

My rationale for the board is as follows:
1. Price: One of the cheapest, but better made, Z68 boards around.
2. Lucid Virtu: Allows the use of the iGPU but revs up the VGA card when demand increases. This saves power.
3. Intel RST SSD caching: Allows software based SSD data management.

Other components I went for are as follows:
Kingston 4GB RAM
FSP Aurum 400W 80 Gold PSU
Sapphire HD5850 1GB extreme (it was on a promotional rate, and good value)
Ikonik EN2 casing
Liteon 24X DVDRW (only on a promotional rate)
Samsung 1TB H.D

I would love to gather criticisms and comments on my purchases and rationale. Please tell me what you think.

 

[Shahmatt]

Best answer selected by Shahmatt.