Upgrading i3 2100 to i5 2400

[joraca]

Hello Tom's Hardware Community,

I heard good things for seeking advice on these forums. As my title suggest, would it be a worthy upgrade? I will be playing MMO's mostly and upon the upcoming Gw2 for its WvW I heard CPU will more important than GPU (sidenote: I will be installing a 560ti or if got the cash to grab a gtx670).

 

[noise]

The clock rates are identical so you're essential trading up for double the cores and the consequential increased L3 cache size.

While you can generally be assured you'll get some benefit from the L3 cache size, whether a game will 'really' utilise your other cores can be debatable. For example, Starcraft 2 (a CPU intensive game) shows barely any improvement between 2 and 4 cores. This is down to the arrangement of threads in the game programming. Other games however do not suffer in this way, you'll need to really get some feedback from people playing the games already to be sure.

 

[duhduh_13]

Some comparison between the 2.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=363

Ballpark around 15-20% increase on games.

Personally I'll wait till GW2 is released and wait for benchmark reviews, then you can decide, either spend more on CPU or GPU.

 

[vdr369]

Hello Tom's Hardware Community,

I heard good things for seeking advice on these forums. As my title suggest, would it be a worthy upgrade? I will be playing MMO's mostly and upon the upcoming Gw2 for its WvW I heard CPU will more important than GPU (sidenote: I will be installing a 560ti or if got the cash to grab a gtx670).

If you want i5 then buy the 2500k instead of 2400 it's worth the extra bucks too, and you can check the comparison

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/363?vs=288

and if you are not on to OC don't buy 2500k. above two gpus are very good with
I5-2500k>i5-2400> i3-2100

if you OC the 2500k, and install the gtx 670 your games are eyefiesta for you.

all I am saying is quad core is better than dual core.and the betterment depends on your usage.

 

[joraca]

If you want i5 then buy the 2500k instead of 2400 it's worth the extra bucks too, and you can check the comparison

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/363?vs=288

and if you are not on to OC don't buy 2500k. above two gpus are very good with
I5-2500k>i5-2400> i3-2100

if you OC the 2500k, and install the gtx 670 your games are eyefiesta for you.

all I am saying is quad core is better than dual core.and the betterment depends on your usage.

Yeah I would have consider the i5 2500k however i have a h67 mobo so the K would not be utilized. I guess waiting for Gw2 full release and benchmarks would be a good idea, otherwise a overhaul and get the i5 3570k + Maxiums Gene V (cause i want a Black / Red Theme ^^) any thought on that?

 

[joraca]

Best answer selected by joraca.