i5 3550 upgrade to i7 3770 is it worth?

[tarmiricmi]

Hi, have a brand-name PC with i5 3550, that supports max i7 3770. Would the upgrade be worth it?
I'm occasional gamer, light virtual pc user (1-2 vms) and office as well, nothing really fancy. Don't plan to upgrade whole PC.
What about power usage of those 2 cpus, any significant difference?

 

[13thmonkey]

no significant difference in usage. Are you seeing any symptoms that more power would alleviate?
VM's more cores would be helpful though.

 

[photonboy]

Not likely.

Your max turbo jumps from 3.7GHz to 3.9GHz (drop 200Mhz per for normal heavy load so that's under 6% difference).

*You'd need a well threaded program like HANDBRAKE (video conversion) to benefit. In theory that can add an additional 30% or so, but in practice even for that it may be under 20% total time savings.

So there is likely much better things you can do with that money such as an SSD, better speakers or whatever.

POWER?
I don't know, like $2 more in an entire year? Seriously it's so low it's not worth discussing.

(assume 5W average higher usage, and 16 cents per KWh. That's 200 hours of usage to add 16 cents.)

 

[tarmiricmi]

So the better future-proofing would be going from 8 to 16 GB RAM instead from 3550 to 3770?

 

[13thmonkey]

it depends on what you do, and what constraints you are hitting. Those two upgrades are worlds apart in terms of cost though.

 

[tarmiricmi]

it depends on what you do, and what constraints you are hitting. Those two upgrades are worlds apart in terms of cost though.

Actually with 16 GB RAM I could assign more RAM to virtual machines that I'm running. The 3770 would cost me 150 EUR (used), compared to 40 EUR for another 8 GB stick. Games don't seem to respond to more than 8 GB (at least for 1080p).

Regarding gaming, my constraint is not the CPU but GPU (gtx 750 ti), but, with i7's HT, wouldn't the gaming frame rate be somewhat upgraded?

Before this machine I've had a Skylake i3 6100. Had a HT, but that was really a dual-core cpu, which was noticeable, so this i5 (albeit third generation) suits me much more better.

 

[13thmonkey]

Simple answer no the i7 will not help with gaming.
Complex answer, it may remove the odd stutter improving your minimum frame rates. A better GPU is the way to improve the gaming experience.

 

[tarmiricmi]

Thanks. That is what I've thought.

 

[Filipe_6]

what is a light VM user? i myself use VM and 8gb is too low of memory, i have 16gb and 1gb used for igpu, then the main sistem will use about 8/10 gb (plex media server and multi user office)

Then i have a VM with linux just for FTP sharing and torrents that use 3 gb.
The cpu is just an i3, and yes the i7 will be great for that, but at the time i did not have the money for the i7T (35w) brcause i want to avoid heat (mini itx)O, noise and reduce power consuption at peak cpu use (24/7 use) when plex is transcoding

 

[tarmiricmi]

what is a light VM user? i myself use VM and 8gb is too low of memory, i have 16gb and 1gb used for igpu, then the main sistem will use about 8/10 gb (plex media server and multi user office)

Then i have a VM with linux just for FTP sharing and torrents that use 3 gb.
The cpu is just an i3, and yes the i7 will be great for that, but at the time i did not have the money for the i7T (35w) brcause i want to avoid heat (mini itx)O, noise and reduce power consuption at peak cpu use (24/7 use) when plex is transcoding

Well I have VM Windows XP w/ 2GB RAM allocated and Linux Mint with 2 as well (but not run simultaneously). Regarding i7 cores, I doubt that logical HT core can be counted as a real one. I don't use the PC 24/7.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

If you're using VMware then logical cores will count. An i7 would be beneficial if the two VMs were allocated two CPU threads, otherwise it's unnecessary.

I agree that an extra 8GB of RAM would be the best way to go.