Is i5 still king for gaming or will i7 show an advantage with DX12 ?

[Gary Scott]

No difference I have found. FireStrike and SkyDive saw no real improvement from i5 to i7, however a massive leap for Cloud gate in i7's favour.

[watercooled]

A synthetic benchmark with a dedicated CPU part isn't necessarily representative of real games though.

[Mr_Chris]

I'm still on an i7 930, the i5 is a tempting upgrade for me but I may be able to squeeze a bit more out it just yet!

[jeromesm3]

Hmm. Looking at this thread with excitement as I'm currently planning a new build soon. Currently have an i7 920 DO and was wondering i7 really needed for playing games like Battlefront, BF4, and Fallout 4

[Gary Scott]

Jeromesm3: depends on what resolutions and FPS you want to play at. If you want to push the threshold of performance, having i7 can only help your chances of achieving it. Necessity of an i7... not really in ny opinion.

[malfunction]

If you're still on a first gen i7 you have three options really:

1) Overclock the nuts off it.

2) Look at the various socket 1366 Xeons on eBay, etc - I have a low power Xeon L5639 (6 core) overclocked to 3.6GHz (4.0GHz turbo boost max) and you can get these for £40 or so, though this relies on having a board good enough to hit 200MHz BCLK - I've had no problem on two boards (Gigabyte G1 Sniper and Asus Rampage II Gene). In fact I think it's largely CPU related as my old i7 960 (45nm) couldn't hit a high BCLK but the two L5639s (32nm chips) hit it with ease.

If you want an easier life the Xeon X56.. CPUs (e.g. X5660, X5675) have higher multipliers and hence can be overclocked with lower BCLK settings, though they are more expensive (£80+) than the low power chips. I'm talking about hex core chips here - you can also get quad core 32nm Xeons and again those can be had pretty cheaply on eBay (e.g £50 for a Xeon X5677 - 3.46GHz, turbo up to 3.73GHz). As a bonus my overclocked 6 core (32nm) Xeon runs cooler than my old i7 960 (45nm) chip did.

3) Sell up and move on. Prices for socket 1366 motherboards are still quite high - depending on what you've got you might get back £150 to £200 for the motherboard and CPU (and you can sell your DDR3 too if you're going bang up to date).

Personally I'm sticking with it for a while - all my money has gone into new storage or GFX cards - I just don't feel like my CPU is holding me back enough to matter.

[Maverick PvP]

I had exactly this decision to make and after talking to some people on the anandtech forums, they convinced me to go with the i7 6700k for DX12/futureproofing. -- Just look for some i7 deals during black friday or when Intel finally releases some stock. I managed to nab one for 270 GBP.

[ixer]

Have a check on Scan now as they have two fairly decently price i7's on offer for black friday

[gupsterg]

Currently Amazon.fr i7 4790K = £223 using their currency conversion option.

Was debating should I get an i7 4790K whilst new are available but viewing some of the game benchmarks on gamesnexus I don't think I need to (yet to determine if good reviews but seem legit).

More results in link, HT OFF is showing better results.







Pretty certain as above 2 are stock clock compares an i5 4690K at i7 4790K speeds is gonna be very close.

Seeing how the i5 3570K ivy bridge performs in GTA V, i5 4690K still gonna be fine.

Did skim read this thread Link:- http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...irect-x12.html to me it seems developers have not really used many cores in DX11 and will perhaps not start using all available for DX12.

[chaoticphun]

only real gain with an i7 over an i5 apart from "future proof" is for multiple gfx cards (i7 has more PCIE lanes)

[gupsterg]

Looking at Intel ARK both have 16 lanes PCI-E GEN 3.0, Link:- http://ark.intel.com/compare/80807,80811

Then 8 PCI-E GEN 2.0 come from the Z97 chipset for mobo devices, Link:- http://ark.intel.com/products/82012/Intel-DH82Z97-PCH

Some mobos are juggling/sharing lanes via PLX chip to give extra features (IIRC).

Differences I'm seeing:-

Cache 6MB vs 8MB

Threads 4 vs 8

Stock Base & Turbo Freq. *

IGP Freq. 1200MHz vs 1250MHz *

Tcase temp *

* items are irrelevant to me to determine if I should or shouldn't go i7 4790K.

Biggest thing making me feel I may achieve "future proofing" is the threads 4 vs 8.

Part of me thinks by the time a game comes out fully using the HT feature of i7 4790K will it not be enough anyway? are DX12 games really gonna come out making use of HT from the outset?

IIRC Fallout 4 make's use of multi-threading, but as the chart I linked is all CPUs at stock wouldn't a i5 OC'd to levels of a i7 perform just as well?

When I decided to go for i5 4690K I used the Custom PC/Bit Tech benches to deem that as I don't use apps requiring HT, then for gaming the i5 4690K is best performance to price ratio.

Lets just say DX12 games do start using HT from the outset but if the i5 4690K is giving enough performance to not bottleneck a GPU why would I want an i7 4790K. Will the % of extra performance be inline with say price difference? if I was to swap at present I calculate I'm paying 59% more over the price of my i5 4690K to have a i7 4790K. I'm using average price of the 2x i5 4690K I bought and cheapest price for i7 4690K, currently £223 for my calc.

As you can guess I'm teetering on the edge of ordering one, ideally I'd like to keep my current rig for as long as I did with my Q6600 and just swap out GPU as and when required.

[antonisk]

Enlightening! Can i add a small question here. I m running i5 2500k would i see a big performance gain by going windows 10 from windows 7?

[gupsterg]

I see no point in using Win 10 at present (listed in my PC usage priorities):-

a) no released games support DX12 at present (AFAIK)

b) no apps I use require W10

c) what I've read about the "privacy" thing about W10 has also stopped me

AFAIK you're unlikely to see any performance boost in apps/games unless there's a specific implementation in the OS which app/game require/use.

[mrgreen009]

The thing to note is that there isn't a massive difference between an i5 and i7 as things stand at the moment - for gaming.

DX12 is a low-overhead API, meaning even less load on the CPU!