I am considering buying an i5 processor based upon price/performance. Is this a good idea right now, the cheapest i7 is $90 more and I’m on a budget, but it seems like the i5 is so new right now.
It doesn’t use hyper-threading, but googling around, it seems like the technology has its advantages and disadvantages, and it won’t be missing too much. My main goal for the processor is sufficient gaming speed for the next few years. Some reviews give conflicting information, and I trust you guys more.
I’ve been looking at an i5 750 myself if I’m able to negotiate an upgrade this year, it seems to perform plenty well enough and the price looks about right. As far as I can tell the main differences between that and an i7 920 platform is one less memory channel and slightly worse performance with multiple graphics cards, but I honestly can’t see a scenario where that is going to matter to me personally. Besides, the new TurboBoost technology actually seems somewhat useful, where it will dynamically overclock one core to give single-threaded applications a bit of extra speed. It’s probably not enough to make a huge difference, but since it’s a lot easier to max out one processor core than four at once I guess every little bit helps.