i5 vs xeon

[Kosios]

what is better?  A single i5 4590 or dual Xeon E5420 (cpu is from late 2007)

[TetraSky]

Obviously the i5. Better IPC and all that considering it's literally 7 years newer.

Having two CPU, won't give you any benefits if the applications/games don't make use of those extra threads.

[downshiftxlr8]

Depends on the use case to be honest but for my needs I would go with the Xeon.

[SirFlamenco]

i5 but see if you could stretch to skylake for better futureproofing

[porina]

i5 would likely be faster for the vast majority of use cases. Those Xeons are ancient, so much lower efficiency. Having double the number of lower clocked cores is unlikely to overcome the i5 with fewer faster and more efficient cores.

[colonel_mortis]

Moved to CPUs, Motherboards and Memory

[SLAYR]

40 minutes ago, Kosios said:

what is better?  A single i5 4590 or dual Xeon E5420 (cpu is from late 2007)

I5, even in multithreaded.

 

Those xeons are quite terrible, anything lower then a  3Ghz quad core on 771/775 isn't worth anything. 

 

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5420-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4670K/m11278vs1538

[Kosios]

2 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

Moved to CPUs, Motherboards and Memory

Oh yea sorry about that.