I5 vs i7:for gaming

[techmaniac1991]

Here is my.problem guys it comes down to this, i want a kick ass cpu now my budget is around 250 pound for the proccesor.
Now ive heard it all "if your just a gamer get the 2500k or 3570k and if your into movie editing and encoding ect go for a i7.
Now what i want to no is say i got a i7 2600k would that do just as good as a i5 when playing games or would it be a little slower
due to hyper threading. I guess i want a bit of both but not if its going to make my gaming experiance worse of.
So say you are in my shoes what cpu would you get if you had about 250 pounds to spend
roughly 300 dollars. Thanks

 

[C12Friedman]

If you have the need for hyper-threading get the i7 - the advantage is actually a "cost advantage" since hyper-threading is the difference and games do not take advantage of that, you'd be paying extra for a feature unused.

 

[obsama1]

Actually, the hyperthreading of the i7 makes it about 1-2FPS slower than an i5. So, then, what's the point of getting an i7? The i7 only excels in heavily threaded apps.

 

[esrever]

the i5 isn't bad at video either.

 

[techmaniac1991]

Actually, the hyperthreading of the i7 makes it about 1-2FPS slower than an i5. So, then, what's the point of getting an i7? The i7 only excels in heavily threaded apps.

True but having hyper threading dosent make much difference to games if its only loosing 2 fps
plus its always good to no you have it i suppose for when you need it because pc's arent just game
machines they will be times when hyper threading will come in handy thats why i think i will
go for a i7 3770k , as i do both gaming and music production , so thd logical one would prob be the i7
its just a shame about the price though, but im sure i will get a few years out it.

 

[esrever]

True but having hyper threading dosent make much difference to games if its only loosing 2 fps
plus its always good to no you have it i suppose for when you need it because pc's arent just game
machines they will be times when hyper threading will come in handy thats why i think i will
go for a i7 3770k , as i do both gaming and music production , so thd logical one would prob be the i7
its just a shame about the price though, but im sure i will get a few years out it.

thats actually false. Hyperthreading only really comes in handy when you do long video conversions and such and even then its 10-20% at the most. The difference in general use is actually insignificant. Most music production won't really benefit from the i7.

 

[techmaniac1991]

thats actually false. Hyperthreading only really comes in handy when you do long video conversions and such and even then its 10-20% at the most. The difference in general use is actually insignificant. Most music production won't really benefit from the i7.

How about running crossfire would the i5 3570k be ok running 2 6950s , i just want a good cpu but if the i5 is going to do just as good as the i7 then to hell with it lol i might aswell save some money and just buy a better cooler for oc . So why do they have hyper threading is it just a fancy add on with only few benefits?

 

[esrever]

How about running crossfire would the i5 3570k be ok running 2 6950s , i just want a good cpu but if the i5 is going to do just as good as the i7 then to hell with it lol i might aswell save some money and just buy a better cooler for oc . So why do they have hyper threading is it just a fancy add on with only few benefits?

hyperthreading is more for marketing more than anything. The benefits are very specific and generally only show up in benchmarking. In general use, the hyperthreaded cores are nearly never used because you have free resources on the normal cores which are much better than the fake cores. There is reason to go with an i7 if you are primarily dealing with video editing but even then the difference isn't significant. 5-10 min faster on an hour long transcoding job isn't realistically going to be affect anything.

The i5 and the 6950s will work perfectly fine together.

 

[camohanna]

You would be better off with a better graphics card and a i5 than a lesser GPU and an i7.

 

[giki]

Camohanna Is exactly right Get the i5 (its more than fast enough for gaming) and get yourself a Good Gpu and lots of ram(for gaming I would recommend 6-8GBs)
And Just keep in mind that if your not happy with its speed you could overclock it (you should not need to) also if you want to get the most speed out of this thing get an ssd or two and put your games on one and your OS on the other.
Then you should be able to play just about any game you want on it without any problems!

 

[techmaniac1991]

Camohanna Is exactly right Get the i5 (its more than fast enough for gaming) and get yourself a Good Gpu and lots of ram(for gaming I would recommend 6-8GBs)
And Just keep in mind that if your not happy with its speed you could overclock it (you should not need to) also if you want to get the most speed out of this thing get an ssd or two and put your games on one and your OS on the other.
Then you should be able to play just about any game you want on it without any problems!

Thats what i plan on doing i have 16 gb of ram, i just thought the i7 looked usefull for future releases which utilize it but there really is no point i will just be using the i5 3570k plus i already have two 2gb toxic 6950,s factory overclocked at 880mhz plus theres a switch to put it to 6970 if i wanted to. Thanks for the info

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Here is a very good piece on hyper-threading in games. http://www.overclock.net/t/671977/hyperthreading-in-games

In the end there is very little value for hyper-threading in most games. I would build my system on the Intel Core i5-3570K and 8GB of RAM as you really wont use more then that unless you start to do some video editing.

 

[giki]

Thats what i plan on doing i have 16 gb of ram, i just thought the i7 looked usefull for future releases which utilize it but there really is no point i will just be using the i5 3570k plus i already have two 2gb toxic 6950,s factory overclocked at 880mhz plus theres a switch to put it to 6970 if i wanted to. Thanks for the info

Im glad I could help!
16GBs will be perfect for gaming and multi tasking!
Im not an expert on GPUs but this site has some really good info on GPUs if you don't already know what you want!

 

[LW_Black4]

You would be better off with a better graphics card and a i5 than a lesser GPU and an i7.

This is a great answer. Since it all happens in the video card for most games, it's better to spend the additional $100 on the video card than get an i7 cpu.

I'm moving to an i5 3570K cpu and GTX 680 graphics card, for these reasons. You can take advantage of all the new features of a Gen 3 build by using a Z75 or Z77 chipset mainboard as well.

Happy gaming!

 

[LW_Black4]

Here is a very good piece on hyper-threading in games. http://www.overclock.net/t/671977/hyperthreading-in-games

In the end there is very little value for hyper-threading in most games. I would build my system on the Intel Core i5-3570K and 8GB of RAM as you really wont use more then that unless you start to do some video editing.

And you can't get much more of an official answer than that. Well said!

 

[dansmynam]

so what is the best answer?
I am also trying to find out which processor to get

 

[esrever]

get an i5.

 

[InvalidError]

In general use, the hyperthreaded cores are nearly never used because you have free resources on the normal cores which are much better than the fake cores.

There are no "fake cores" or any sort of inferior resources for each core's second thread. Each core maintains two concurrent execution contexts and multiplex instruction streams across shared execution resources. Each thread running on any given core is every bit as real as the other. Neither thread has any more or less available execution resources than the other. The instruction scheduler tries to balance execution rate between both threads while neither is stalled (conditional branch, cache miss, dependencies, etc.) and will issue more instruction from whichever thread has issuable instructions whenever the other is stalled.

CPUs have more execution resources than their instruction decoder and scheduler can manage to fill on every clock cycle because a single instruction stream does not have enough instruction-level parallelism and instruction diversity to make it practically possible. Simultaneous Multi-Threading works around the ILP brick wall by enabling CPUs to blend instructions from multiple streams to keep more execution resources busy at all times.

There is reason to go with an i7 if you are primarily dealing with video editing but even then the difference isn't significant. 5-10 min faster on an hour long transcoding job isn't realistically going to be affect anything.

Completing jobs 20-30% faster with HT (typical for threading-friendly tasks) is a very much real benefit and can make a very much real difference for some people. For most people though, there are much better places to spend that extra $100.

 

[esrever]

There are no "fake cores" or any sort of inferior resources for each core's second thread. Each core maintains two concurrent execution contexts and multiplex instruction streams across shared execution resources. Each thread running on any given core is every bit as real as the other. Neither thread has any more or less available execution resources than the other. The instruction scheduler tries to balance execution rate between both threads while neither is stalled (conditional branch, cache miss, dependencies, etc.) and will issue more instruction from whichever thread has issuable instructions whenever the other is stalled.

CPUs have more execution resources than their instruction decoder and scheduler can manage to fill on every clock cycle because a single instruction stream does not have enough instruction-level parallelism and instruction diversity to make it practically possible. Simultaneous Multi-Threading works around the ILP brick wall by enabling CPUs to blend instructions from multiple streams to keep more execution resources busy at all times.


Completing jobs 20-30% faster with HT (typical for threading-friendly tasks) is a very much real benefit and can make a very much real difference for some people. For most people though, there are much better places to spend that extra $100.

hyperthreading has a real and virtual core. Everything you said is wrong...

 

[InvalidError]

hyperthreading has a real and virtual core. Everything you said is wrong...

There is no "real and virtual" core. Each core runs two threads and both threads get equal treatment up to whatever extent the instruction mix will allow.

 

[esrever]

There is no "real and virtual" core. Each core runs two threads and both threads get equal treatment up to whatever extent the instruction mix will allow.

only problem is dividing the cores in half does no equal 2 cores. If 1 logical core is loaded, the other has very little performance, thus the scheduler will no longer use it until all other threads are loaded first. This will seem like there is a virtual core when you are executing on a multicore processor. If thread 1 is loaded, thread 2 won't be used until thread 3, 5 and 7 are used in the i7. The other threads are treated as not equal. There might be no real and virtual cores in the hardware implementation but the OS will treat it as such.

 

[InvalidError]

only problem is dividing the cores in half does no equal 2 cores.

There is no "dividing in half", both threads have equal access to all shared execution resources and the CPU's instruction scheduler will feed whatever instructions it can down the execution pipelines as evenly as it can.

If the OS' scheduler leaves some threads idle, then whatever software is running at that time clearly is not multi-threaded enough to leverage HT and for those, the whole discussion is moot. Most video editing and rendering applications however are indeed capable of leveraging just about however many threads you can throw at them, which is why the i7 is frequently recommended to anyone who makes serious use of such applications.