Intel i5-2400 Multitasking and Performance vs Dozers

[zangy]

Hi, I was wondering How the i5 2400 performs against the AMD FX 8150 and the other Dozers cuz I want to be sure that I'm buying the CPU that gives me what I need..

Pricing:
i5-2400(used and in great condition) = 142$
i5-750 = 119$
FX 8150= 200$
FX 8120= 171$
FX 6100= 123$

What I want:
-When I Multitask I don't want any freezes like when I ALT/TAB across opened applications.
-I want it stable while rendering videos and playing games at the same time even recording games while rendering would be great.

Question:
-So which of the processors that I mentioned is bang for the buck and meets my requirements?

I would appreciate your help in this, Thank you.

 

[willard]

What I want:
-When I Multitask I don't want any freezes like when I ALT/TAB across opened applications.

Five year old dual core chips can pull that off. Lag when switching between open windows has little to do with how many cores you've got. It takes a few hundred nanoseconds for the computer to perform what's called a "context switch" and start running the newly selected process.

To avoid lag when tabbing, what you really want is lots of memory to be sure the program you switch to doesn't get paged to disk. I strongly recommend getting 8GB or more of memory then disabling the page file. You get no benefit from paging if your computer has enough memory to keep everything loaded at once, and Windows will page things even if you're at 25% memory usage.

-I want it stable while rendering videos and playing games at the same time even recording games while rendering would be great.

Not going to happen.

It doesn't matter how fast your chip is, rendering scales more or less perfectly with core count, so it's just going to consume 100% of the resources you've got. Make your computer a thousand times faster and rendering just uses a thousand times more CPU cycles and you still can't game.

You can do video encoding while you game if your encoder supports QuickSync and you've got an Intel chip that supports it, but not rendering. Also, $150 chips is not where you're going to find phenomenal rendering performance.

I have no idea why you'd ever want to do this, but you could game while running heavy CPU tasks in the background by screwing with CPU affinity. Windows can be told which cores a process can run on, so you could dedicate a pair of cores to your game and the rest to rendering. There's no automated way to do this that I'm aware of, and I think it's a bad idea.

Just render when you're not gaming, or build a rendering box.

-So which of the processors that I mentioned is bang for the buck and meets my requirements?

The only requirement that can be met is met by all the chips you listed. Best bang for your buck is still the 2500k in my book, especially if you overclock.

That said, you haven't given enough information for me to make a recommendation. How much rendering are you going to do? With what program? Is GPU accelerated rendering an option? Did you really mean encode or edit videos, and not render? What video card do you plan to use? What games do you plan to play?

 

[zangy]

Five year old dual core chips can pull that off. Lag when switching between open windows has little to do with how many cores you've got. It takes a few hundred nanoseconds for the computer to perform what's called a "context switch" and start running the newly selected process.

To avoid lag when tabbing, what you really want is lots of memory to be sure the program you switch to doesn't get paged to disk. I strongly recommend getting 8GB or more of memory then disabling the page file. You get no benefit from paging if your computer has enough memory to keep everything loaded at once, and Windows will page things even if you're at 25% memory usage.

-I want it stable while rendering videos and playing games at the same time even recording games while rendering would be great.

Not going to happen.

It doesn't matter how fast your chip is, rendering scales more or less perfectly with core count, so it's just going to consume 100% of the resources you've got. Make your computer a thousand times faster and rendering just uses a thousand times more CPU cycles and you still can't game.

You can do video encoding while you game if your encoder supports QuickSync and you've got an Intel chip that supports it, but not rendering. Also, $150 chips is not where you're going to find phenomenal rendering performance.

I have no idea why you'd ever want to do this, but you could game while running heavy CPU tasks in the background by screwing with CPU affinity. Windows can be told which cores a process can run on, so you could dedicate a pair of cores to your game and the rest to rendering. There's no automated way to do this that I'm aware of, and I think it's a bad idea.

Just render when you're not gaming, or build a rendering box.

-So which of the processors that I mentioned is bang for the buck and meets my requirements?

The only requirement that can be met is met by all the chips you listed. Best bang for your buck is still the 2500k in my book, especially if you overclock.

That said, you haven't given enough information for me to make a recommendation. How much rendering are you going to do? With what program? Is GPU accelerated rendering an option? Did you really mean encode or edit videos, and not render? What video card do you plan to use? What games do you plan to play?

Thank you, your post was very informative and I meant editing Videos first then Rendering.. I use Adobe AE and Sony Vegas for editing stuff.. I mostly play games like League of Legends and Torchlight II, Blacklight Retribution and Mercenary Ops. Maybe some graphics intense games too like BF3?

I'm thinking about choosing between i5 2400 or fx 6100 because I can't find any cheap i5-2500 from every store i visit.
Between these two cpu's which one do you recommend? they say IF I OC the 6100 to 4.8 something like that that it will perform just like the i5-2400? But it will also consume more power.. and I've also known for a very long time that intel chips last longer than amd chips..

 

[zangy]

UP for this thread.

 

[mocchan]

Please don't bump, it's against the forum rules

If you're going with a Bulldozer CPU, I would highly recommend something from the FX-81XX line. Anything below that and the performance wouldn't justify the price :lol:

The only decent CPU's in the FX series at the moment are from the 8XXX series, they perform just like an i5 in most applications. They make for GREAT budget rendering CPU's as well, and since you mentioned editing videos, this would be the ideal CPU for you.

Power consumption will be significantly higher than an Intel chip, however, the cost per year would be a few dollars, not too significant IMO.

If you were to purchase a CPU now, I would recommend waiting a few weeks. AMD's Vishera chips (Piledriver) are due to be released within the next few weeks They have proven to have a performance increase of around 5-10% through Tom's testing a few weeks back with Trinity APU's.

 

[zangy]

Thanks for your advice I think I will be waiting for Vishera Chips..

and.. I wont be bumping threads in the future again..

 

[mocchan]

Good!

And you're welcome, glad you found my advice helpful

 

[zangy]

Best answer selected by Zangy.