i5 8400 or i7 8700

[Maodun_Kross]

All,

 

I am putting together a budget build under 1k.

• Play Games
• Virtual Machines
  • I want to be able to create a couple VMs so I can setup coding environments. Won't run more than one or two at a time.

Looking at the following;

• i5 8400 or i7 8700
• 16g RAM
• GTX 1050ti w/4g or GTX 1060 w/6g

Is the CPU a good choice? Will it work for VMs? I thought 1060 over the 1050ti would be an easy choice but I am unsure about the cards. I realize that the price difference between the CPU's and video cards is ~110 but that is a lot when you are trying to stay on budget. 

 

Thanks for any help you can give (had to change CPU supposed to be 8700 not 8400)

[IsaacThePooper]

There's no such thing as an i7 8400.

[tp95112]

2 minutes ago, IsaacThePooper said:

There's no such thing as an i7 8400.

Miss typed

[Mira Yurizaki]

Hyperthreading usually improves things by up to 20% if the application can even take advantage of it. Most of the time, at the time of release, the i7 doesn't perform much better than the i5 in gaming.

 

In the use case of virtual machines, unless you're actively doing something on all of them or do have a high performance use case, I wouldn't worry too much about the lack of available cores. The OSes are going to idle just like anything else.

[Maodun_Kross]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Hyperthreading usually improves things by up to 20% if the application can even take advantage of it. Most of the time, at the time of release, the i7 doesn't perform much better than the i5 in gaming.

 

In the use case of virtual machines, unless you're actively doing something on all of them or do have a high performance use case, I wouldn't worry too much about the lack of available cores. The OSes are going to idle just like anything else.

Nothing fancy. Most of the time it will be one VM running, just trying to keep things clean and separated from the rest of the os.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Maodun_Kross said:

Nothing fancy. Most of the time it will be one VM running, just trying to keep things clean and separated from the rest of the os.

Yeah, then I wouldn't worry about whether or not the system can handle 6 or 12 threads.

 

I'm pretty sure I ran VMs on a Core 2 Duo back in the day.

[Jumballi]

If you go with the i7, then your build might peak over $1k, since it's $200 more than the i5. 

 

Im experimenting with an 8100 build, and that's only $70 less than the 8400. With a 1050 ti and some redundancy, it came out to around $850.

[Princess Luna]

Having in mind the i5 8400 is an i7 7700k I'd actually just get it, it pairs alright with a 1070 Ti makes for a great gaming station.

 

The i7 8700 would require the GTX 1080 Ti to take all your extra money worth of investment, if you're looking for raw gaming performance increase without much multi-tasking.