I5 or I7 for gaming?

[Refious]

I'm glad you went with the Core i5, Karl. For gaming only, it's performance is great and you didn't have to spend an extra £100 for the i7. That £100 saving could be invested into your graphics card.

Personally, I would go for the i7 as I'm into gaming and designing, so I'll need the extra horsepower.

[talus]

All the advice I've been given for my new build seemed to suggest i5 over i7 when you consider performance per pound spent.

[Mister]

The i7 is very slightly faster, but nothing noticeable in most games. The i7 will start to pull ahead once more games start using multi-threading though. It will pull even further ahead if they use hyper-threading (none do yet though, it's mainly for VMs).

If you want the best bang for your buck in games, AMD cpus are probably the best value actually. They aren't quite as good at single core processing as Intels (what old and most current games like), but more games are going to be multi-core now that consoles are too.

For cpu heavy stuff other than gaming though, Intel is the only sensible choice.

[mynameissi]

Depends what you can afford. The i5 is usually ample for any sort of games currently and is a good processor. But like Mister said, the i7 has many advantages over it, its just the cost of the i7 is a lot more than an i5 which could be better spent on a gfx card or Mobo.
If you can afford it, an i7 is great, otherwise i5

[shaithis]

The i7 will start to pull ahead once more games start using multi-threading though.

Maybe temporarily but there is a massive push towards mantle/dx12 and you'll probably find even less than the current small handful of titles that get CPU-bound within the next 6-12 months.