i7 6700HQ vs i5 6440HQ

DingdongTP · July 4, 2016

Can anyone please tell me what are the real world advantages of the i7 over the i5?

Do CPU intensive games run faster? Do videos take a lot less time to render? I'm not interested in synthetic benchmark scores, just real world scenarios.

Thanks guys!

porina · July 4, 2016

In essence the difference between them is if you need or want hyper-threading or not. And that comes down to if your software can make use of it or not. In the best case having HT where it can be used adds about 50% CPU performance. In other cases, the difference can be zero. You can look up other i7 vs i5 benchmarks for an idea if a particular game or other software uses it or not.

roylapoutre · July 4, 2016

CPU intensive games benefit A LOT from an i7 compared to a i5. Hyperthreading and cache memory are more important than what you can read everywhere. "i5 are more than enough for gaming, i7 are worthless !" is what everyone is saying, even PC hardware specialists will tell you that sometimes. It's not true ! i5 are of course great CPUs, but it's not enough in every scenario. I upgraded my i5 3570k @4.6GHz with a i7 4790K@4.6Ghz. I was really skeptical at first but I changed my mind quickly. CPU intensive games like Vermintide or GTA V saw significant gains, sometimes 10 to 15 more average fps, same on the minimum framerate. i5 can bottleneck your system quite easily, believe me.

porina · July 4, 2016

1 hour ago, roylapoutre said:

I upgraded my i5 3570k @4.6GHz with a i7 4790K@4.6Ghz.

Be careful when comparing across generations. The latter one (Haswell) included new instructions which, if used, can also give a massive performance boost. I don't know if games actually use it though.

roylapoutre · July 5, 2016

16 hours ago, porina said:

Be careful when comparing across generations. The latter one (Haswell) included new instructions which, if used, can also give a massive performance boost. I don't know if games actually use it though.

That's totally true, but as you said, I don't think games are taking full advantage of that kind of subtlety. I simply wanted to debunk the myth you hear everywhere about i7 not being useful for gaming. If you search on forums, look at different articles etc, you'll always see people saying that upgrading from a i5 2500k or 3570k to a newer i7 isn't worth it at all for gaming. Which is false. Of course, the differences will be less important between an i5 and i7 from the same generation, but it will not be marginal. CPU intensive games are more and more numerous and i5 CPUs can be a bottleneck.