I was just wondering what people thought about real world use over benchmarks. Does anyone notice the difference between a 2500 or a x4 955? Would be good to hear anyones thoughts.
Depends on what you use it for entirely. For older games and web browsing there would likely not be a difference. For modern games, 3d rendering, video encoding etc the difference would be night and day. Probably best to start by defining 'real life use' a bit more
i went from a 965 to a 2600k at 4.6ghz, so technically a vast improvement but in terms of stuff like os snappiness and internet and stuff, not much difference at all games increased about 6-7fps and obviously stuff like rendering decreased by a lot too if, like me you are going to have to buy a new mobo and ram (i was using an am2+ mobo so i had ddr2) then personally i wouldnt, unless you do a lot of cpu intensive stuff or you just like having new kit. like i did. because tbh a phenom 955 is already a quad core. its not a bloody 10 year old pentium. sometimes you have to remind yourself that
That was exactly my jump. For movie encoding for dvd backups and such I saw a huge improvement especially when overclocked. up to 125fps - on the first pass(I can't be bothered to hang around for the second). Doesn't take long to do a 2hour movie. Games, such as skyrim became a lot smoother with a lot less random dips in the cities. This was before the patch came out to address cpu performance. Otherwise, I can say, for actual general use, like day to day use, the main difference is in the ssd, not the cpu. Even my old Athlon 4200+ felt like a super computer compared to other pcs sans ssd.
I went from a 965BE to an i5 2500k nearly the same as you, I had an SSD and a 580 which I kept, I didn't notice any improvement in day to day usage like browsing the web etc. Huge difference in gaming (As I was CPU bound due to a terrible mobo) and rendering, zipping etc. I'd say take the plunge, the i5 2500k is this generations Q6600 and will be viable for a good few years Edit: In addition to modern games, if you use emulators you'll find a huge jump in performance over the 965/955, handy for playing PS2 titles
agreed! The benchmarks performance increases you see are mainly only manifested in that type of use - Gaming, rendering, intensive use. I mean I for one never ever tax my i5-2500k any more than about 10% usage, 99% of the time. Even when gaming the CPU is used so little (30-40% max?). It makes me feel like it was a wasted purchase 0.0
