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I5-2500K vs. i5 3570K vs. i7 2600K vs. i7 3770K

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Alright! I have all of my stuff in from newegg...

Rosewill Challenger Mid ATX Case
Rosewill HIVE 650W PSU
1TB Western Digital SATA 6.0 HD
64G Crucial SATA 6.0 SSD for Smart Response Cache
LG DVD-R SATA 6.0 Optical Drive
Rosewill Wireless Card
16G (8Gx2) GSkill Ripjaws
ASRock Extreme4 Z77 Mobo........

...and now I need my chip!

I have been set on the i5 2500K for quite a while for it's price tag and strong OC'd clock speeds, but now I am about to purchase and am trying to reach a final verdict. I am a career graphic designer, musician as well as an avid gamer that will want to play Civ, Minecraft, Skyrim and SWOTOR among others. I will be running Adobe CS lots, and gaming lots!

I guess the price/hyperthreading benefit is at the heart of this decision. Sandy Bridge (2500K) will OC cooler and farther than the Ivy Bridge chips (2600K, 3570K and 3770K) and since I am OC'ing, the clock speeds and performance are very similar if not flat out the same if I am not mistaken.

I understand that games usually will utilize no more than 4 threads so hyperthreading is uneeded, however I am unsure if the benefits from hyperthreading while using my design software will justify spending the extra 100 bucks on the Ivy chips.

If you have any insight let me know...

Oh, one more thing that make me wanna go with the 2500K is that with my Z77 chipset I can always upgrade (if I REALLY want to spend more money) when Haswell chips surface and the i7 take a $100 dip in price.

Any suggestions?

More about : 2500k 3570k 2600k 3770k

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mi1ez said:
If you're using the machine for graphic design, I would strongly recommend looking up software-specific benchmarks to compare HT/non-HT and SB/IB.


Absolutely! Thanks! I was just on AnandTech looking at the benchmarks and I really don't think the difference I see there, which is neglegible between the 2500K and the i7's, is enough to justify the 100 more for hyperthreading. I am settling more and more on the i5-2500K. Anyone think otherwise?
CPUs Expert

Sounds like a great decision to me. I'd be tempted to put the money you save into a bigger SSD and have it as a dedicated boot drive with room for some, if not all, software.

mi1ez said:
Sounds like a great decision to me. I'd be tempted to put the money you save into a bigger SSD and have it as a dedicated boot drive with room for some, if not all, software.


For sure! After I ordered it, I kind wished I got the 128G and partitioned off the 64G for the cache and used the other half for OS and games. But it should still be good and fast. I will have to put it toward the GPU. I plan on either a 560 ti or a 660 ti depending on how much I wanna spend (200 or 300). Yeah I think I'll go 2500K and a 660 ti. At least I'll have all of my drives on sata 6.0 so i bet with smart response caching it will still blaze and I can dump that money into the GPU.
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