CPU Is there any point in i5 (or anything mid-range)? Want a discussion...

First up, I've been lurking here ever since the CPC site got FUBARd, but moved to the new meeting place and haven't posted here. However, I've read a lot of interesting articles and reviews and also spent a fair bit of time browsing the forums. Well done you lot, there's plenty to read and be educated by in here.

Now onto my question. It seems to me that the 920, has the potential to be the new Q6600. It's been around a year already and the momentum isn't slowing. With 930 on the horizon and Gulftown around the corner, it seems that the socket has plenty of life left and dare I say it, could be the only known "future-proof" platform currently available. There's an upgrade path, but also the performance on tap now, is likely to last for at least 18-24mths for the kind of apps and games the average Joe is likely to use (at least I think so).

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Phenom XII 550 BE on AM3. With a platform cost of £200 it's less than half the price of i7 920. It's pretty overclockable and Bindi says he would get one for a "cheap" build.

My question is this.... With all modern CPUs maxing out on clock speed between 3.5 and 4ghz and the only real differences being minor architectural ones and/or the number of cores, does it really matter what CPU you buy, to an extent?

Presumably, they'll all run Win 7 happily and depending on the amount of RAM used and GPU paired with them, will all play games and do just about any task most of us would throw at them? I kind of liken this to cars. Most people only need to do 70-80mph and every modern car will do that, some will do more, but you don't necessarily need it. Make sense?

On that basis, if i5 platform cost is £320 approx (chip, board and RAM) surely i7 for £100 more is a no brainer? Additionally, apart from very intensive multi-tasking and video work etc, won't a dual-core Phenom feel almost as quick in real terms?

My car might have great rolling road figures, but if it doesn't feel responsive and quick, what does it matter? I think benches can be the same sometimes with PCs. I'm just wondering if 920 is the only thing that really offers anything worth paying for over and above a dual core Phenom like the 955. And whether or not money is better spent on GPUs, SSDs, RAM and other things.

Dual-core AM3 = £200
i5 (which bit-tech conclusively say is better than Phenom X4) = £320
i7 920 = £420

Discuss......

 

this depends on what your doing 3.5Ghz on an i7 920 is ALOT faster than 3.5Ghz on a phenom II. so to say they are minor architectural ones isnt really accurate. There is considerable difference between AMD and intel. But if you dont use your horse power then 3.5Ghz i7 920 is not gunna feel any different than a AMD 4600+ if all you do is browse the web and do office things.

True they will all run happily on win7 and all play games and do modern tasks. but taking your car analogy imagine your car is doing 70mph and you start going uphill it will slow down wont it. If your car is more powerful you can simply put ya foot down a bit and it will continue to run at 70mph while the slow car has no more power left and you start to slow down until you reach a flat again. Think of the hill as games and intensive apps like video editing etc.

yeah id opt for i7 920 at the moment because i5 is still rather expensive in comparision so alittle bit more cash gets you alot more performance. if ya check benchys in games and apps i7 920 pisses on just about everything. This can make the difference between playable and unplayable sometimes.

 

plus you only get 16 pci-e lanes on i5, which makes a difference if you ever go for SLI/crossfire

 

For the kind of audience this forum has I don't think a dual core CPU is a sensible buy any more. Using your car analogy, it's like a 2WD car vs. a 4WD car. You don't need to use them all the time, but when you need the 4 cores you'll wonder how you ever coped without them, and the improvement in general multitasking performance is worth the extra cost over a similarly performing dual core.

On to your other two options, I can definitely see a point in the i5 CPU. It's around £100 less as you say (depending on motherboard/memory choice), which will be a lot more attractive for people with slightly lower budgets, and will allow them to spend more of their budget on a graphics card for instance. That will improve performance in games more than an i7 920 ever would.

Right now the main benefits of the 1366 platform is the triple-channel memory controller, double the number of PCI-e lanes (32), and Hyper-threading, so it all depends on whether those 3 things are worth an extra £100 to you. For me, it's not an issue; I can only see myself using one graphics card in a system at any one time, I don't use any applications which are very RAM-intensive where only two channels would present a bottleneck, and similarly I only use applications which use more than 4 threads on a very infrequent basis (usually encoding audio/video).

However, I can easily see how these 3 things may be big deciding factors for some people, so it all comes down to individual requirements and how much you have to spend.

 

Pff... you don't need either...

I have a second hand e8400 in my rig running on a P35 motherboard and it fab.

 

When you're talking about £300, an extra £100 would mean a budget increase of over 30%... I don't get how that is only a small amount?

That £100 would go much further in the graphics card market. I'd argue that for most people, an i5 with a 5870 would be better than an i7 with a 5850 - both CPUs overclocked of course. Of course if only gaming then MHz are most important so I'd drop back on the cores, but imagine most users multitask more than they realise.... every computer has different needs and as such I can see a place for the mid-range

 

I know i7 at 3.5ghz will be substantially quicker than a 550 at the same speed. My question was, is that a paper/benchmark difference, that isn't QUITE AS noticeable when browsing the web, watching TV, and general stuff (including gaming). Yes it's faster, but is Phenom slow Of course it's subjective, but what Phenom offers is £200 platform costs.
Adam, you're right. An i7 is more powerful than a Fiesta in my analogy, but the Phenom (Fiesta) would appear to offer what most people need for less than half the price. Besides, stick a 5 series ATi with it and surely there aren't many things that won't be playable?

SLi/Crossfire is of no interest to me. I've had an SLi capable motherboard since 2004, I've never used it and I don't expect to. I don't want the heat, hassle, noise, or cost and I don't need the additional performance. That's often been the view of CPC over the years, perhaps the bit-tech faithful differ in that....?

Perhaps this is the crux. Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm not as excited by the best and latest hardware as I once was. I just want some future-proofing and plenty of headroom to do the things I need to do. The Phenom would probably do everything that most people on this forum need, but they want more cores. Even though I don't think quad core is fully mature just yet for everyday tasks.

That said, if you buy into the more cores = best vibe, then i7 is a no brainer for £100 more. Just save up a little longer, or by your components a bit at a time.

My point is, surely Phenom 550 will achieve everything asked of it, but i7 offers so much more as to be worth the price tag. Anything in the middle seems to be somewhat of a no mans land at the moment..... No?

 

I can see a place for the mid-range, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that there doesn't appear to be a very well priced mid-range from Intel at the moment, and the mid-range from AMD is poorly performing. So the mid-range offers neither value or decent performance at the moment. When you had Core-based Pentium as budget, C2D as mid and C2Q as high-end, there was a price point for everybody. What I'm thinking is, the price difference between i5 and i7 is out of whack and despite me wanting AMD to sort something out, every X4 article I read says it's no good compared with i5.

It just seems like it's a choice between really cheap, or really fast and anything else is not really great value at the moment.

 

i think ur view is a little skewed...for those that cant afford core i7 but can afford i5, its ideal...it is their mid-range. and it beats amd's high end. it's worth it over an x2 550 because they are getting to a point where a high end xfire/sli setup can bottleneck the cpu...

 

Only in very heavily multi-threaded apps and Intel-favouring benchmarks. In normal day to day use a 4Ghz i7 isn't gonna be any faster than a stock Quad Phenom II.

If your comparing a modern day quad core CPU (i7 or Phenom II) to a 5 year old+ outdated architecture CPU then yes, but what okenobi said in his first post about current mid-range CPU's being fast enough to run current apps happily is absolutely correct. Modern CPU's, be them Intel or AMD, are either limited by GPU's or HDD's. Overclocking is only necessary, imo, if you want to increase benchmark scores of if you have monster GPU setups.... and willy waving of course.

I've said this a couple of times already and i'll say it again, I felt no loss of performance in normal day to day use going from a 3.8Ghz Intel QX to a stock (2.8Ghz) Tri core Phenom II. Not in normal windows/web use, not in games, not in viewing media, not in installing or scanning HDD's.

 

well if you look at bit-tech benchmarks for CPUs you will notice that there is a big difference between CPUs and games.

i7 920 (overclocked) got 32/36 FPS but identically setup AMD965 BE (overclocked) 26/33 FPS and a AMD 955 (stock) only got 21/31 FPS.

i guess its down to how much money you wanna spend

 

If you look at the Bit-Tech review on the Phenom X4 965 C3 the results for Crysis using Crysis v1.21, 64-bit, DX10, High, 1,680 x 1,050 2x AA no AF:
Phenom x4 965 (stock) - 31/22
Phenom x4 955 (stock) - 31/21
Core i7 920 (stock) - 30/24

Certainly nothing in that. Even when overclocked the Core i7 only gains 3 or 4 fps. I am of the view that for gaming it is better to spend less on the CPU and more on the GPU.

 

The only reason i went down the i5 route was because of the cheap mobo i got in the MSI deal.
The i5 makes more sense than the 1156 i7 parts imo, But like many have said in everyday tasks the differences between the low, mid and high chips arent nearly as great as we're lead to believe.

 

What if your day-to-day use involves extracting compressed archives, transcoding video, or playing games other than World of Warcraft? An i7 isn't needed by everyone, but certainly some users will benefit.

 

This is what I'm talking about. We can all talk benchmarks all day, but it's just like my bro and his mates arguing over who's got the most BHP on a rolling road. It's largely irrelevant in everyday usage.

tonpal, those numbers are interesting. They kind of back my inital thoughts on the subject.

trig, I'm not talking about Sli/Crossfire. That's also largely irrelevant IMHO. What can't you play with a 5870? For that matter, at 1680x1050 what can't you play with a 4890? If there's anything, it's a very short list. Also, if you can afford a "high end xfire/sli setup", why can't you afford the extra £100 for i7?

To give some background to my personal situation, I'm running a 2ghz socket 939 X2 3800+ with 2gig of RAM and a 66GT. Clearly, gaming is out of the question these days (although Ground Control II, Starcraft and UT99 still work beautifully!) but everything else is ok. To me, even a core-based Pentium would be lightening quick.

But that's not what this is about, I wanted people to debate the relative merits. It seems like we're in a unique position at the moment. Since CPUs hit the Mhz wall and everything goes multicore, it appears that the difference between CPUs in real everyday apps is negligible. That's what I think and I was hoping to see what everybody else thought.

Perhaps on a website such as this, I'm likely to be quote benches all day long, but I thought some people might find it an interesting discussion....

 

here's a discussion point for deciding between i5 and i7: RAM prices.

i was going for i7 860 + 8GB RAM combo due to my love for huge memory space yet cannot afford the 12GB i7 920 build. RAM price play a HUGE role in buying a new system, especially when it's as high as today.


talking from personal experience, upgraded from Intel Core2Quad Q6600 at 3.4Ghz to i5 750 at 4Ghz, theoretically more than 50% per core performance increase. yet, i hardly noticed any difference in every-day applications. sure WinRAR and encoding is a bit faster, but IMHO it was not worth the £300 on top of selling my old platform.

but it comes back to what is enough? to some people, enough is when they have top-of-the-range stuff while to others Intel Atom may be fast enough. the decision to upgrade or not should be based solely on the user in question. benchmarks can only give a rough idea.


to be honest, im a bit confused what kind of discussion you are looking for, something regarding the best bang for bucks platform (CPU+mobo+RAM) or where to spend your money for a gaming machine? you keep saying every-day tasks while referring to gaming, machines for either are completely different beasts.

 

not sure how that would be irrelevant. since most people that can afford an hd 5870 probably arent gaming on a 19-22 in monitor.
not everyone can afford the increase to go i7. why spend relatively the same money on a lesser performing amd quad rig over an i5? and for those that cant afford a quad rig, then a dual core amd am3 rig would be the way to go.
nothing has changed...there's still a budget level cpu for the low end, a slightly more expensive cpu for those with a little more cash, and the high end for those with no budget liimitations. unfortunately for amd, their high end doesn't quite match intel's mid range, and i personally dont feel like $30 price difference is worth going to amd. the only thing amd has going for it is that 775 is dead so a dual core or maybe triple core budget am3 rig is worth recommending.

 

I really can't agree here at all because if you look at benchmarks and testing what do you see? You see that the i5 performs nearly identical to the i7 apart from where hyperthreading is a bonus on certain applications, if you are a single graphics card gamer but do video encoding etc where it pays to have more than 2 cores I really don't see why you'd coff up the extra dough for a 920, fair enough it might pay off in the future to have triple channel memory when the 920 is considered an outdated CPU and triple channel is a must for day to day life but untill that time comes why pay £100 more for more than 16 PCI-E rails that you won't use, extra 2GB of ram which won't benefit you much unless you don't know what that little X is for or the hyperthreading

 

I was reading this thread through, getting more and more motivated to pitch in and defend the i5 that I bought this week (but haven't got setup yet) but I think storm20200 has said pretty much what needed saying

The i7 920 does outperform the i5, but from what I've read it doesn't appear to be substantial and the i5 will pretty much match it on day-to-day stuff. I aspire to get into graphical design work and needed a new computer to help me along. If I was an established professional who did a lot of heavy work with graphical and video software then I probably would have gone for something better, but for the intermediate I think the i5 750 is ideal.

Wuyanxu also akes a good point - everyone always says if you can afford it pays to invest in the most ram, the best monitor etc etc.... but when ram prices are high surely it pays to only buy what you reasonably going to require on a regular basis, then upgrade when prices come down and the software is capable of taking advantage of it.

 

This is what I was asking. At every other point in my time with building/using PCs. Spending that kind of cash, got you a significant improvement. My question was, do people really need to spend mid-range money for what appears to be a comparatively underwhelming improvement in everyday tasks. Gaming to me (and I presume to most people on here) is an everyday task and it seems that for most games and most systems, the GPU choice is massively more important if you're floating in the late 3s to 4ghz on any CPU from C2D on. Interesting link though.

The reason i7 seems worth buying is because it's a genuine step up in terms of technology. What would be interesting to see would be somebody with a Q6600 or a fast C2D spending their money on an SSD and new GPU, instead of going i7. Then bench the two.

Trig, I'm not advocating a "lesser performing quad AMD rig". I'm saying, for the money, what does i5 (or quad AMD) do, that an OCd 550 BE or C2D/C2Q doesn't?

At the moment, money seems better spent elsewhere, unless you're going i7. Maybe I'm wrong though, maybe people here have to have the latest stuff and are happy to pay for it. I wonder how many people here are still running C2D/Q and are still happy? Sure, we all WANT the latest stuff, but is there much point at the moment.

I wasn't sure there was and wondered what people's opinions were. It would appear though that most people here want the best benching stuff, regardless of how much value they get for their money. That's totally cool and as has been said, each upgrade is up to the individual.

I'm yet to be convinced by anyone that an i5 or quad AMD is that much better than cheap AMD/existing 775, as to be worth spending on it. It seems nobody can say, "Yes, i5 is LOADS better than my old C2D/Q system and I'm really glad I spent the money." Whereas plenty of people are raving about SSDs and I'm sure more people are excited by GPU upgrades and perhaps new displays at the moment.

But hey, what do I know, my CPU is 5yrs old!