Joined: Dec 08, 2009
Posts: 211
Location: Illinois
ive been looking through new egg for some computer parts and i saw that they had a intel quad core i5 and i7
i5 is about $200 and the i7 is about $290-300
its been on my mind that is it really worth paying about a hundred dollers more for the i7 or should i just take the i5?
advice would really help. thanks
Joined: Feb 01, 2010
Posts: 172
Location: Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
Joined: Dec 16, 2009
Posts: 1091
Location: North Carolina
basically it comes down to 2 things
If you answer yes to either of the following then you will want the i7
1. Do you plan to SLI vid cards? ( run dual video cards )
2. Do you do advanced things like HD video editing and 3D works? ( i7 has hyper threading while the i5 doesn't )
If you have said no to either of the above then the i5 is the route you should take; Save the money to put into a better graphics card. Although buying a video card now could have draw backs in the fact in march Nvidia is releasing there new card. ( HUGE price drops )
New Siggy; What do you think?
Joined: Mar 29, 2009
Posts: 54
Location: Massachusetts, USA
I've read the same comparisons. I've been watching sales at Micro Center and if you're patient you can get some real steals. This week they're offering the i7-920 for $199 and the i7-860 for $229. Street price for the i5-750 is around $199.
The i7-9xx series have hyperthreading and use the LGA1366 socket and chipsets. It's got full width PCI-E x16 lanes so it's best if you really want to go all out with SLI. The motherboards are also expensive.
The i5-750 is the only quad-core i5 at the moment. It does not have hyperthreading and uses the LGA1156 socket and chipsets. If you do SLI you'll only have 2 PCI-E 8x lanes. The motherboards are much less expensive than the LGA1366 boards.
If you can find one at a good price, the i7-860 sits somewhere in the middle. It has hyperthreading and also uses the LGA1156 socket and chipset. Again there's the limitation on SLI and the less expensive mobos. It's also a 95W power part versus the i7-9xx at 130W.
I spend a lot of time reading up at
www.tomshardware.com when planning a build. There's also anandtech.com. Most places I've seen recommend the i5-750 as the biggest bang for the buck. Realize that when you get up over $200 for a CPU it's very small gains for very big bucks. I haven't seen many sales on the i5-750, mostly sales on i7-920/860. Guess the market has found it's price point.
As many have said, get a good CPU but don't put all your money there. You'll often do better to skip the fastest CPU and put a little more in a better vid card and extra memory. And never skimp on the power supply. I've seen more builds destroyed by cheap power.
Joined: Dec 16, 2009
Posts: 1091
Location: North Carolina
Also to add to this;
Never buy a crappy hard drive; you can have the best system in the world but if you hard drive is slow it becomes you bottleneck ^_^
New Siggy; What do you think?
