i7 & 7970 or i5 & 7950?

[blackbelter]

Which option will be optimum for ED games? People say that going higher than i5 2500K has a diminishing return, but people here also say that ED games are bottlenecked by CPU power.

 

Mind that if i5, it will be the top of its line, and if i7, it will be the lower budget one.

 

What's your opinions?

[EtherealN]

The differences between the i5 2500k and i7 2700K is: .2GHz of clock speed and the i5 does not have Hyperthreading.

 

If you are going to overclock, the clock speed difference really doesn't matter for you, the two have pretty much the same ceiling both thermally and voltage-wise.

 

Hyperthreading will not benefit you in DCS, it's mainly a utility for server functions (not DCS server, things like web servers, database servers etcetera) and video encoding - and of course Folding@Home.

 

Basically, if you are on a budget, go for the i5 unless you specifically intend to do a lot of video encoding and similar. Especially since you would be forced to go lower than the i7 2700k. If you, on an i7, have to go lower than 2600, the i5 2500k (even without overclock) will give you better performance in DCS. So as it looks to me, i5 and 7970 looks like a win-win for you. Also, of course, i7's below 2600k (basically anyone without a "k" in it's name) cannot be overclocked pretty much at all. The only OC venue on those is baseClock, and on Sandy Bridge chipsets this clock governs everything - CPU, RAM, PCI bus, even the USB... So you would be unlikely to get more than a 7% overclock with that, and even then it's with the most expensive motherboards on the market.

[Flаnker]

I recently bought a processor i52500K-I am very pleased.:)

[blackbelter]

The differences between the i5 2500k and i7 2700K is: .2GHz of clock speed and the i5 does not have Hyperthreading.

 

If you are going to overclock, the clock speed difference really doesn't matter for you, the two have pretty much the same ceiling both thermally and voltage-wise.

 

Hyperthreading will not benefit you in DCS, it's mainly a utility for server functions (not DCS server, things like web servers, database servers etcetera) and video encoding - and of course Folding@Home.

 

Basically, if you are on a budget, go for the i5 unless you specifically intend to do a lot of video encoding and similar. Especially since you would be forced to go lower than the i7 2700k. If you, on an i7, have to go lower than 2600, the i5 2500k (even without overclock) will give you better performance in DCS. So as it looks to me, i5 and 7970 looks like a win-win for you. Also, of course, i7's below 2600k (basically anyone without a "k" in it's name) cannot be overclocked pretty much at all. The only OC venue on those is baseClock, and on Sandy Bridge chipsets this clock governs everything - CPU, RAM, PCI bus, even the USB... So you would be unlikely to get more than a 7% overclock with that, and even then it's with the most expensive motherboards on the market.

 

Basically that settles my question. Thanks. My other hobby is photography, and I edit raw files fairly often. That's why I am going for 7970 rather than 680, because according to online reviews, nvidia gtx680 is lacking computing power, if I have understood that correctly. Do you think i5 will be dragging image processing time? Gaming is still the primary task of my build, though.

 

I recently bought a processor i52500K-I am very pleased.:)

Looking forward to mine, too!!

[EtherealN]

I'm actually not sure either card uses it's GPU-compute for general image processing. Never checked that though (I don't do much of photography at all so never had cause to look into that).

 

The i5 should be quite fine for image processing though - compared to i7 2600k I'm seeing it score only slightly lower for most of the tests they did: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/12

 

Basically, for DCS there's almost complete parity between the i5 2500k and the i7's (if overclocked), and if money is an object you're still pretty much "second best" for most other things (excluding a few workload types like multithreaded 3D rendering where the Sandy Bridge E's would be better).

 

With DCS being the main task, the i5 2500k is still the way to go IMO. And it overclocks nicely, so you do retain the option of giving it a solid boost whenever you need it in the future (though after-market cooling would definitely be recommended in that case).

 

The one thing I might say though is that if you can live with what you have, it is almost tempting to hold on to it and wait for Ivy Bridge, but I don't have a solid release date to give for that (and of course no solid idea of prices for boards and chips either). That is though one of those cases where there will almost always be something that it might be worth waiting for, so then one might end up never buying anything at all... :P

[blackbelter]

I'm actually not sure either card uses it's GPU-compute for general image processing. Never checked that though (I don't do much of photography at all so never had cause to look into that).

 

The i5 should be quite fine for image processing though - compared to i7 2600k I'm seeing it score only slightly lower for most of the tests they did: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/12

 

Basically, for DCS there's almost complete parity between the i5 2500k and the i7's (if overclocked), and if money is an object you're still pretty much "second best" for most other things (excluding a few workload types like multithreaded 3D rendering where the Sandy Bridge E's would be better).

 

With DCS being the main task, the i5 2500k is still the way to go IMO. And it overclocks nicely, so you do retain the option of giving it a solid boost whenever you need it in the future (though after-market cooling would definitely be recommended in that case).

 

The one thing I might say though is that if you can live with what you have, it is almost tempting to hold on to it and wait for Ivy Bridge, but I don't have a solid release date to give for that (and of course no solid idea of prices for boards and chips either). That is though one of those cases where there will almost always be something that it might be worth waiting for, so then one might end up never buying anything at all... :P

 

Sure I am waiting for ivy bridge! I am using sandy bridges just as examples. Thanks!

[blackbelter]

Thanks to EthereaIN for the link. I am impressed by i5 2500K...

[Flаnker]

I suggest to buy this processor - it is one of the best.