a good friend is asking , whether he should jump ship from an AMD Pheniom X4 965 to an Intel i5 2500k; he`s using 2 x HD 6850`s in CF i dont know how to honestly answer him any help?
thinking about it - although currently im not convinced that he would actually see any real difference in games with his rig
2 x HD 6850`s in CF , asus M4A785TD-V with 2x4 1600mhz ddr3 and the Phenom 965X4 , he games at 1900x1200 (some dell screen iirc)
What does he use it for? Hard to find reviews that include the i5 2500K and the Phenom II X4 965 in the comparison tables, but tomshardware.com has the Phenom II X4 970 in the table. The tests cover a range of things, though the games could have been better chosen. If he's wanting to upgrade for gaming, then I wouldn't think he'd noticed any diff just now. 80fps vs 50fps sounds amazing, but would you even notice that without using fraps? I'd leave it until he starts to notice some slow down and then use the same amount of money on what will by then be better kit. EDIT: The 50fps vs 80fps was the largest gap in a benchmark I saw.. in some cases the 2500k was a few fps lower.
I would say no. Going from quad to quad will not really make a huge difference to any "real world" experience with the PC, but you will probably see an improvement in things like benchmarks.
Good set of benchmarks here, even if they don't have many games related ones which I know is what you're really looking for. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/102?vs=288
+1 for that link.. wish I'd found it when buying my CPU. I read so many reviews and benchmarks a dreamt about the damn things.
If it is 90% gaming would he not notice greater performance spending the money on improving his graphics cards? (Not that I'm saying that they are shabby!) Shoot me down if I am wrong here, as this is not from personal experience. And again, the increase may not be noticeable.
Going from a 965 to a 2600k made a reasonable real world difference. It obviously made stuf like rendering faster, and benchmarks were much improved. On average I gained about 5-8 fps boost in games
We need to make sure we mean the same thing when we say "real world" - for example, 5-8 fps boost in games isn't something I would notice unless I had fraps running... and then I'm not noticing it, I'm measuring it, so it's not a real world difference. It's the same with benchmarks - I've run things like 3DMark and the Heaven benchmark hundreds of times with different graphics cards and different systems, and the difference isn't perceptible IMO; the resulting score is another measured variable. I recently upgraded from a GTX460 to a GTX480 - THAT's a real world upgrade right there. My fps has almost doubled in some games.
What he said, it wouldn't be a big upgrade for the cash you pay, I suggest you put your monney in something else
