Why the recommendation for i5 as opposed to i7 or i9

[Coldkil]

It's EXCLUSIVELY related to gaming.

Most games now don't make much use of multiple cores (WoW is a very special case of this) so HT that is active on the i7 doesn't bring any perfomance improvement. like AT ALL. You're spending 100$ more for something you'll never make use of, while you could use them for a better GPU/PSU/Whatever else.

i5s are exactly the same as i7s, but without HT. Until you run them stock, clock speed is not an issue and they can run exactly the same.

Basically, it's all about perfomance/price ratio, in which case i5 is definitely a winner.

Again, it's just a gaming discussion. If you add multitasking/streaming/workload = making actual use of the additional cores then we enter another realm and then an i7 should be better.

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This:
https://image.ibb.co/jL591K/factuurmmo.jpg

That is the PC itself (3400 euro) and then a monitor of 650. So ok, it is a little over 4000.. but not much..

Funny thing is, except Wow I don't really play modern games... most of my time I am playing WinUAE games (Amiga emulator).

Well, i don't want to attack you - so take this with a pinch of salt. But you got straight for overpriced components in some cases that doesn't give you anything for the additional value. Though it's your own money and if i had the availability i would have done the same because i could.

Example: the 8086k is just a binned 8700k. It's literally the same processor, just with another stamp. You could have save 120€ just on that. Then 512GB+1TB NVMe is just overkill, plus NVMe has negligible perfomance increases. I'm all for SSD-only systems, but 600€ of drives are just not needed, especially with the 1TB one which is storage i suppose.

The rest in the end is on line with current prices, you got the top line GPU, ram costs way too much now, so you cannot really make a deal on them; same for mobo since you got the top tier. All in all it's not a bad setup at all, you just went over the top on a couple of things.

EDIT: you could have spent a little less on GPU since ASUS has become the Apple of pc components - the quality is top tier, but also the prices that reflect more the ROG brand than else. But again, i buy Strix GPUs too because they're just good.

I'd like to see a photo of the build

[potis]

I currently have a i7 2600K overclocked at 4.5GHz ... its a darn good processor which was recommended by the build of the month from this site.

Why are the current builds focusing on i5, as opposed to current i7 or even the i9.

I am not massively technical when it comes to computers, so i am curious as to why this is. Is it because i5 are just better for WoW in general? or because better bang for buck? or are they terrible?

Would love to hear some advice on this as I am looking to build a new computer within the next year. TBF apart from sounding like an 80yr old man with lung cancer its held up better than any other computer I have ever had, so my next build is looking to have at least 6-8yrs lifespan (current build is almost 7yrs old) and that isn't negotiable tbh as I dont have alot of money so I have to save up a long while, therefore has to be reliable and room for growth with applications of usage.

Many thanks.

Could write a page but the end result is, VFM.

Value for money for the average user/consumer, there is nothing else about it, some people might have 2000-5000 euro/pounds/dollars to throw and not care, most dont, therefor there is always a budget, which is why VFM is the most important aspect of PC building.

Knowing your customer + VFM, really

All in all, wait for October to upgrade, get the i9 9900K with a Z390, default is gonna be 5Ghz-->4.6Ghz for most of its life, obviously as long as its price tag remains around ~400$ and not something extreme because Intel just can.

[Hoofey]

My issue with the build of the month pc's, especially the Narwhal and Unicorn ones is that theres basically no difference between them. The only performance difference is 1070ti vs 1080 and a slightly better SSD, and that isnt exactly the biggest difference in performance. Rest is just the case + heatsink etc.

With streaming being such a big thing these days, maybe the Unicorn build should be focused on that by adding an i7 to it so theres actually a difference between the builds.

[pansertjald]

Could write a page but the end result is, VFM.

Value for money for the average user/consumer, there is nothing else about it, some people might have 2000-5000 euro/pounds/dollars to throw and not care, most dont, therefor there is always a budget, which is why VFM is the most important aspect of PC building.

Knowing your customer + VFM, really

All in all, wait for October to upgrade, get the i9 9900K with a Z390, default is gonna be 5Ghz-->4.6Ghz for most of its life, obviously as long as its price tag remains around ~400$ and not something extreme because Intel just can.

All the leaked roadmaps say's Q1 2019, so it looks like we have about half a year yet before we see the 9000 series from Intel

[Planetdune]

It's EXCLUSIVELY related to gaming.

Most games now don't make much use of multiple cores (WoW is a very special case of this) so HT that is active on the i7 doesn't bring any perfomance improvement. like AT ALL. You're spending 100$ more for something you'll never make use of, while you could use them for a better GPU/PSU/Whatever else.

i5s are exactly the same as i7s, but without HT. Until you run them stock, clock speed is not an issue and they can run exactly the same.

Basically, it's all about perfomance/price ratio, in which case i5 is definitely a winner.

Again, it's just a gaming discussion. If you add multitasking/streaming/workload = making actual use of the additional cores then we enter another realm and then an i7 should be better.

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Well, i don't want to attack you - so take this with a pinch of salt. But you got straight for overpriced components in some cases that doesn't give you anything for the additional value. Though it's your own money and if i had the availability i would have done the same because i could.

Example: the 8086k is just a binned 8700k. It's literally the same processor, just with another stamp. You could have save 120€ just on that. Then 512GB+1TB NVMe is just overkill, plus NVMe has negligible perfomance increases. I'm all for SSD-only systems, but 600€ of drives are just not needed, especially with the 1TB one which is storage i suppose.

The rest in the end is on line with current prices, you got the top line GPU, ram costs way too much now, so you cannot really make a deal on them; same for mobo since you got the top tier. All in all it's not a bad setup at all, you just went over the top on a couple of things.

EDIT: you could have spent a little less on GPU since ASUS has become the Apple of pc components - the quality is top tier, but also the prices that reflect more the ROG brand than else. But again, i buy Strix GPUs too because they're just good.

I'd like to see a photo of the build

I know what you mean but when I get a new rig I am always like "well it is only 100 more" and then you go "oh but only 50 more there" etc etc I do know the 8086k is a cherry picked 8700k but at least it means you win the silicon lottery.

[potis]

All the leaked roadmaps say's Q1 2019, so it looks like we have about half a year yet before we see the 9000 series from Intel

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/in...n-october.html

In what world? They are launching in october according to that at least, and i trust guru3d mostly than any other site.

With 9900K coming earlier probably, end September even.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ne...t-in-2019.html

The majority will launch later near Q1 2019.

The only thing that worries me is the pricing that will come with.

[Anevers]

It's EXCLUSIVELY related to gaming.

Most games now don't make much use of multiple cores (WoW is a very special case of this) so HT that is active on the i7 doesn't bring any perfomance improvement. like AT ALL. You're spending 100$ more for something you'll never make use of, while you could use them for a better GPU/PSU/Whatever else.

There are games that do take advantage of multiple cores and threads, mainly the AAA titles like Assassin's Creed Origins and Battlefield 1.

Sure that's only a handful of games, and most games today and prolly 2019 will run fine on 6c/6t, but are you building for a PC that will still play AAA titles PC Games in 4th quarter 2020 smooth as butter? More game Devs will make games that will use more cores and threads, however if you are playing WoW and i5 will be plenty.

[pansertjald]

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/in...n-october.html

In what world? They are launching in october according to that at least, and i trust guru3d mostly than any other site.

With 9900K coming earlier probably, end September even.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ne...t-in-2019.html

The majority will launch later near Q1 2019.

The only thing that worries me is the pricing that will come with.

I can see that the raodmap has been updated since yesterday.

I was looking at this one yesterday https://videocardz.com/76910/intel-r...ming-next-year and it say's Q1 2019.

Now this one is up. The same you link to https://videocardz.com/76929/lastest...nch-in-october

I think we will be getting the most expensive CPU line yet from Intel and it will bite them in the ass

[amarrite]

Price VS performance really. Unless your going to do some kind of heavy video editing just stick with an I5. Stay away from anything that ends in a K unless you plan to overclock. If you do just get like an 8600K or something. It's like 100 bucks cheaper than the 8700K last time I looked. if you want AMD there are plenty of suggestions on here. I personally have an 7600K and couldn't be happier.

And to be honest the BOTM is a pretty good guideline for a really good gaming machine.

[Coldkil]

There are games that do take advantage of multiple cores and threads, mainly the AAA titles like Assassin's Creed Origins and Battlefield 1.

Sure that's only a handful of games, and most games today and prolly 2019 will run fine on 6c/6t, but are you building for a PC that will still play AAA titles PC Games in 4th quarter 2020 smooth as butter? More game Devs will make games that will use more cores and threads, however if you are playing WoW and i5 will be plenty.

While i agree that more cores is more future-proof, there are 2 things that have bigger impact on the topic.

- first, HT is not more cores. HT is just more threads. There are not many softwares that actually support HT (most of them are workplace suites like Adobe and Autodesk), while to mantain HT active you're actually using resources. It's very little, but if you nitpick you're just wasting them if we talk specifically for gaming.

Must be said though that the new 9700k is definitely worth buying over a 9600k: 8 real cores, no HT, and soldered IHS. Hell i'd buy it for the IHS only.

- second, most of the playerbase don't even look at this stuff. 60% of players have a 1050 or 960 card, and the near totality play at either 1080p or even 1320x768 (which is the native resolution of kinda old notebooks) because the enthusiast market is just a little fraction of the playerbase. Developers won't suddendly make the jump to "more cores required" because even 4 cores is taxing for low tier systems which most people use - i know they can tailor the game to run better on better hardware while still keeping it "playable" on older ones, but it's a lot of work that many times isn't worth the effort/money investement.

I'm sure games will make full use of multiple cores in the future and being future proof now is good, still i5 are on par with i7 currently, and still good for the 9th series.

[Gray_Matter]

While i agree that more cores is more future-proof, there are 2 things that have bigger impact on the topic.

- first, HT is not more cores. HT is just more threads. There are not many softwares that actually support HT (most of them are workplace suites like Adobe and Autodesk), while to mantain HT active you're actually using resources. It's very little, but if you nitpick you're just wasting them if we talk specifically for gaming.

Must be said though that the new 9700k is definitely worth buying over a 9600k: 8 real cores, no HT, and soldered IHS. Hell i'd buy it for the IHS only.

- second, most of the playerbase don't even look at this stuff. 60% of players have a 1050 or 960 card, and the near totality play at either 1080p or even 1320x768 (which is the native resolution of kinda old notebooks) because the enthusiast market is just a little fraction of the playerbase. Developers won't suddendly make the jump to "more cores required" because even 4 cores is taxing for low tier systems which most people use - i know they can tailor the game to run better on better hardware while still keeping it "playable" on older ones, but it's a lot of work that many times isn't worth the effort/money investement.

I'm sure games will make full use of multiple cores in the future and being future proof now is good, still i5 are on par with i7 currently, and still good for the 9th series.

I agree with you for the most part. HT is not the same as real cores. We disable them in our software because it hurts performance for us. It is something that can help in games especially if you look at the benchmarks. There are some cases with the R5 gains significantly over the i5 because of the extra threads.

My disagreement comes in developers making use of the extra cores. Developers won't build software for 4 cores. If they choose to use more cores then it will easily scale up from 4 cores. Not linearly but it will still scale. Once you add threading then you have already done all the hard work so there is no point in limiting the number of cores. That said, what we are seeing in a lot of games isn't real multi-threading. They generally offload a couple of tasks to a second core as is the case in WOW. That type of threading won't benefit from any more cores. Fortunately that type of thing seems mostly an issue with legacy games. Most modern games already have to deal with a large number of slower cores because that's what the consoles use.

My point is that I do think that having more than 4 cores will be beneficial in the future. There is some diminishing returns because of graphics cards being more of a bottleneck these days and because thread scaling is not linear.

[Artorius]

HT is just SMT, and it exists to make better usage of hardware resources on superscalar CPUs. It's there to help filling the pipeline loading different components of the core in parallel to ensure efficiency.

This makes sense because in modern core designs you don't have a single ALU per core for example, since complex CISC instructions are broken apart into smaller and simpler RISC instructions in the microcode, and running those smaller instructions in parallel when possible means you'll finish the big complex user-facing CISC instruction in fewer clock cycles.

But you can't always do this, and your workload is not always capable of being run in parallel, which means some of those extra resources get wasted if you can't throw something else at them. Consumer HT simply shows a single physical core as 2 logical ones, and it requires OS-level support because the scheduler is not supposed to throw things at 2 logical cores of the same physical core when there's a different physical core available for example, it's only supposed to do it when it'll be beneficial, which is when you have a vastly parallelisable and can use all the resources available.

Note that highly parallelisable can also mean having multiple smaller things running at the same time. If for example something is running at the core but at some point in the pipeline it'll have a few ALUs available, SMT should use those ALUs for something else at the same time as the main thing is still running. However, being able to share the resources as if a single core was 2 can hurt performance when the scheduler doesn't do a good job at managing the load, it most likely will never hurt total throughput but you might get worse performance in one of the things running while something else, less relevant, is running better.

[Coldkil]

My point is that I do think that having more than 4 cores will be beneficial in the future. There is some diminishing returns because of graphics cards being more of a bottleneck these days and because thread scaling is not linear.

Well, that was also my point but maybe i explained it badly It's only that for now since most people play on outdated/low tier systems games in general are more tailored to run decently on those systems - that's the reason why they scaled only so far with more cores.

But since a CPU usually lasts quite a lot (i'm talking 6-7 years at least) for now an i5 is more than enough already, and when it's time to replace it we're going to have way better tech available.

EDIT: the whole topic is the specific "i5 VS i7 for gaming". Given this specific scenario, i don't recommend buying any i7 over an i5 up to the 8th generation. 9th generation is shifting things a lot towards the i7 for the moment, especially if the 9600k is still a 6 cores while 9700k is going to be 8 cores no HT AND soldered IHS.

[mittacc]

Your comparing apples to oranges, Ryzen 2700 wasn't out 7 years ago

Why is that relevant? Would you say that any processor that was good in the past is good today as well? silly sentiment imo

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Considering when it came out, it's a pretty fucking good CPU. 91 months (7½ years, give or take) vs 3 months, and the Ryzen 2600 is only 84% better

See my answer to moremana

[moremana]

Why is that relevant? Would you say that any processor that was good in the past is good today as well? silly sentiment imo

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See my answer to moremana

But you were comparing it to your cpu. The cpu he currently has is still relevant, it obviously is not as good as any cpu today, but your Ryzen isnt much farther ahead in sc performance, hows that make you feel?

[ProfessorTjc]

Because BotM focuses mostly on MMO games (and even more on WoW). Back then I can see the argument for a 4Core/8Thread CPU but, the new i5s are 6 cores which are just as powerful as the older i7s. The newer i7s which are 6Core/12Thread are just a waste of money unless you're doing more than just playing games. Same goes for the AMD side, I would recommend an R5 over R7 for video games purposes in general.

Edit: I'm taking about the intel CPUs that are out now and not the future 9k series, just to clarify.

[mittacc]

But you were comparing it to your cpu. The cpu he currently has is still relevant, it obviously is not as good as any cpu today, but your Ryzen isnt much farther ahead in sc performance, hows that make you feel?

I don't really care about that My ryzen is in fact a budget cpu I bought because my old mobo broke when I was going to install my brother's previous I7 on it and so I had to buy it.

Point being that saying that it is a "darn good" cpu is just objectively false - just like my cpu isn't "darn good" either. It's a budget cpu for 200 euro with taxes etc included. It might have been "darn good" but it is not as of this moment.

[moremana]

I don't really care about that My ryzen is in fact a budget cpu I bought because my old mobo broke when I was going to install my brother's previous I7 on it and so I had to buy it.

Point being that saying that it is a "darn good" cpu is just objectively false - just like my cpu isn't "darn good" either. It's a budget cpu for 200 euro with taxes etc included. It might have been "darn good" but it is not as of this moment.

Semantics

Might want to look that up.

[mittacc]

Semantics

Might want to look that up.

This is not even remotely justified to be called "semantics" lol. Would you call a GTX 680 a "darn good GPU" today when a 1080ti is about 250% faster? http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...-Ti/3148vs3918

[moremana]

This is not even remotely justified to be called "semantics" lol. Would you call a GTX 680 a "darn good GPU" today when a 1080ti is about 250% faster? http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...-Ti/3148vs3918

Its ok, Im not going to argue with you. That piece of shit cpu as you call it is on par with yours in gaming.


Annnnd, no one is telling him to buy it, he already has it so your point again is moot.