i5 760 vs i7 860 to be specific. I'm looking for something that overclocks well, but 1366 seems very expensive so it's probably out of the question for me. How about mainboards? Which 1156 board is good for overclocking? I will be running at least 2-3 VMs on it and maybe some games, I think that's about it. The Core i series is so confusing now
I think Hyperthreading is worthless unless your apps support multithreading very well, so far I can't find a single one yet, except maybe encoders. I'm not sure which board is the best for overclocking, most of them seems to be the same. I don't think i7 1156 overclocks well.
In that case I will just choose i5 760. As for overclocking, 1175 should be fine since I'm not expecting high overclock. 3.6-3.8 GHz shouldn't be hard to get.
HT isn't that useful now that you have quad cores to play with. Unless you really max out those 4 cores, HT won't help much.
Thanks for the input Now I'm considering whether to save money for a 1156 platform or go back home to import my aging E8600 here
I agree. If you already have an E8600, it's really good enough, unless you really want to focus on professional 3D rendering and/or video encoding. The only reason to "upgrade" is if you don't have a computer here (like you)... or if you are just lich and have no idea what to do with all that money. (Hint : donate to me!!!)
I honestly expected my i7 870 to be much faster than my E8400. But I was truly disappointed. I definitely prefer higher clock speed than having more cores, which is why I gotten i7 870 because it's running at 3.6GHz when running with single core.
Probably because you are not using all 4 cores. Try encoding a video clip and you will that it's much faster (in that instance).
But I don't upgrade my machines to encode video. I wanted a faster machine to edit RAW photos. Getting 8GB RAM would have been a much better upgrade for me.
You guys are making Trinity feel old. Her lil' e6600 heart still beats strong. Four years already! http://forums.techarp.com/general-hardware/22653-new-pc.html I wonder if I maxed out the ram and switched to win7 64 bit from XP pro if that would make Trinity seem faster.
Depends on what programs you run. The gist of hypertreading is to allow the processor to run all the units of the processor regardless of a singular oprand (fused or not fused). Technically, most software is either ALU or FPU heavy, without hyper threading, looking at it from a single core standpoint, the scheduler has give time to one app at a time, and if that app is say FPU heavy, the ALU sits there like a dumbass unused. If you can figure out what programs you're likely to use and can find distinct differences in the calls they make (eg; Simulation is mostly FPU, Vector graphics are FPU, Scalar and Bitmat are ALU and so forth) and you find that there's a good mix, you probably can gain performance in a heavy multitasking environment. It also has the side effect of making the whole process of processing shit a lot more efficient, you get technically more bang for your power buck although that is hard to quantify in other than execution efficiency (which is a IT nerd concept) As always, ask yourself about what you do and what you are going to do, then compare it to the purchase you're about to make. Simple as that.
Yup! In that case, more RAM would definitely help speed things more than a faster CPU. In fact, my next upgrade would a new notebook with an eye on increasing the RAM to 8 GB!
Don't worry. The E6600 is a great CPU and it will continue to serve you well. Upgrading to Windows 7 will help quite a bit as it runs faster and is more efficient in its use of memory. Even so, more memory will help improve real world performance, especially if you run a ton of applications like I do. Right now, I have a total of 30 windows opened from 14 different applications, and that's not even counting apps that run in the background or in the notification area (system tray).
That's true. There are applications that do benefit from hyper-threading. In any case, I consider HT to be a bonus and keep it enabled.
I've done some benchmark on it, and the difference is negligible (applications that I use anyway), and the additional power consumption was noticable. I have permanently disabled it.
I should one day take the time write in regards to the low level mechanics of hyper threading and its subtle features. Its been here for almost a decade now since the Pentium4 C days and has always been a very interesting concept for x86 execution. Maybe some running of specialized ASM looping code to illustrate the difference between HT and non HT? Sounds interesting. All things considered though, I'm probably too lazy and would rather look forward to a new SIG Sauer or HK pistol and waste copious amounts of ammo on them
