I7 vs I5 for next Gen Gaming

[ShindoSama]

On PC there is no such thing as "next" gen. That's the beauty of the Master Race.

[TheRisingMyth]

You can't think of hyperthreading as increasing the performance.  Physically, there aren't any more transistors on an i7 than on an i5.  The max amount of calculations it is possible for it to do is no different between the two chips.

 

What hyperthreading does is not to increase performance, but to prevent performance decrease, by holding backup tasks for cores to do whenever a thread is stalled.  When the CPU is being used inefficiently, hyperthreading recycles the lost CPU time and uses it for something else in the meantime, to reclaim the efficiency, whereas on an i5 that unused CPU time would remain unused and simply go down the drain.

 

Of course, if the program is such that the CPU is already making efficient use of its resources, then there is nothing being lost for hyperthreading to recover.  The CPU is already operating at high capacity.

 

This is the case with games, the CPU cycles are already being used efficiently.  "Optimizing code for hyperthreading" would essentially consist of taking a step backwards in game programming and writing games to be less efficient, so that hyperthreading can recover that lost efficiency and bring performance back to where it should have been in the first place if it had been programmed efficiently... If that makes any sense.

 

Ok i admit that i'm wrong, sorry for the misinformed post.

[V1RK]

i5 or 8350 between them

[Wolfur]

AMD FX 8350 / 8320 isn't a 'real' 8-core either

AMD FX 8350 / 8320 draw significantly more power

 

Although future games might use more cores, not everything in games is parallelizable (aka multi-threadable), many of those 'side-calculations' are probably less complex and you won't see 100% usage on all you cores. Futhermore not only the count of processor cores but rather the total performance for all cores is.

 

This, this, this!

 

I would also like to add that games indeed use more FPU-based calculations than ALU-based and just to remind you:

 

FX 83xx has 4 FPUs, 8 ALUs.

i5 has 4 FPUs, 4 ALUs.

i7 has 4 FPUs, 4 ALUs and can feed them faster than i5 creating potential 1 additional thread per each core.

 

If one does not overclock, the ultimate 'nextgen' cpu imho would be Xeon E3-1230v3 (this is cheaper Haswell I7 4770 without iGPU basically).

 

If one overclocks, either i7 4770k or FX 83xx. (but with FX 83xx you lose single thread performance).

[Prodigy]

In PC there is not next gen brother....

[maazster]

I would go for the AMD 8350 for next gen, really cheap and also form what i have heard of mantle it would be the best choice for gaming.

[rlcastro]

i'm having a hard time which one to get too. 

[Linus_torvalds]

If rumours are correct then AMD might be a better option

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICVeN6WEGgg

 

FX 8350 4.6 ghz loses vs i5 3570k 4.2 ghz AMD is never better choice unless you talk about graphics cards

4670k 4.5 ghz will beat any AMD OCed to max for 24/7