Forgive me, for I cannot remember specifically what Haswell i5 I have and can't check at the moment. I believe it's a 4670k but for some reason when I say that number it doesn't sound right to me. Anyways, I've actually been maxing my CPU lately with some work loads I have been doing. I use to have an i7 Sandy Bridge a few years back but decided to downgrade because it always seemed unnecessarily powerful for my workloads. Now times have changed.
The extra power is not absolutely necessary, I can still get by with my i5 but a little power is always nice. So my question is not a question about practicality of the performance of the i7, but rather the economical choice of an i7.
an i7 LGA1150 still seems to run in the $400+ range which is pretty expensive. I was considering getting a GTX1080 if I was going to be spending any money in the $300+ (+++) range of computer parts. If I am going to be dropping this kind of cash on it, is it really a reasonable economical choice? Or would I just be better off building a new PC?
I guess what I am trying to say: it it a necessity at $400? (and I get that's probably a hard question for strangers to answer since they don't specifically know my workload)
Using all threads at 100%, or just a couple maxed with some just sitting there?
From an i7-3770K to the i5-4670K the per-thread performance is like a 5% increase, pretty minor in my opinion if your workload is not optimized for multiple threads. For multi-threaded workloads the difference between the two will probably be like ~20%, with the i7-3770K in the lead.
IF it's purely for gaming you will not notice a difference between the two whatsoever in 98% of games.
Well since each core is only a single thread, I was kind of thinking a multithreaded core would help. Oh, and, no it's not for gaming. I'm aware gaming is more gpu bound than cpu. It's for music...and I guess to an extent video editing - though CPU hasn't been a major factor there. Music is more RAM and CPU dependent. I knew I needed to upgrade my RAM but today I ran into a CPU wall rather than a RAM wall.
I remember back when I use to work on my music on my Sandy Bridge i7 I could barely push my software to utilize 30% of the system under a standard workload. I'm not sure if the software can utilize multithreaded systems, but it definitely seemed to perform better on my old system. The software itself only runs in 32bit mode - I know, I know, what a joke of a piece of software. I haven't wanted to update to the 64bit version simply because last time I upgraded, even though it declared it was backwards compatible with older projects, a lot of my old projects wound up becoming broken or didn't function correctly. So I just haven't wanted to upgrade until I have completed all my existing 32 bit projects so when I upgrade I don't lose anything. (or maybe I can just buy a second license...)
Regardless of the situation, it's a 32 bit software that last night I had pushed a project to reach 80% CPU load and I needed to use more plugins but was worried how stable the project would become if I pushed it past the 80% load.
oh, and for the record; 3770k's look pretty damn expensive. Think I will need to stick with a regular 3770 part. That's okay, my tiny little ITX can't really do overclocking because of heating problems (which makes my 4670k kind of silly)
if your program can utilize multiple cores the xeon e3 1231 v3 is and option, retain your current MB but get a 4 cores 8 threads, seems the price is up since i got mine but it usually cost about the same as an i5
Well we basicly finaly have come to a point on which the most highend gpu's, like the GTX1070 and GTX1080 can get an i5 on its knees in certain games. i mostly recommend to people to pair those cards with a modern i7 for the best experiance realy. And i assume that its gonne be the same with the new AMD Vega gpu´s most likely.
At this point it sounds like I mostly need to build a new system. I can keep my mobo and PSU, but my ITX board supports only 2 slots of DDR3 RAM, with a max of 16gb total...and to access the ram I have to take off my CPU cooler...but I would need to take it off anyways so I could replace the CPU...and I do really want a 1080. So....hmm.... Guess I better start saving up.