http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6052731&Sku=A79-1055

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4959973&sku=I69-0750

Same price...I WANNA GO FAST

theyre roughly equivalent

I personally would go for the PII cuz motherboard cost can be lower

I can vouch for the i5, it's a hell of a processor.
AMD is damn good at high clock speeds, but I'm pretty sure as of now it's like the relationship early model Pentium 4s had with AMD, except reversed. That is: AMD has brute force speed, Intel has well designed chips that perform better.
But take that with a grain of salt. the i5 also has turbo, where if it detects something using 2 cores or less it overclocks itself to 3.22 Ghz.

So you guys are telling me the the 6 core thing is just a gimmick and the quad core i5 will perform just as good?

No I said go for the PII

they are roughly equivalent in performance although in single-core performance you will have to OC the PII to higher clock to match the i5 and things that can take advantage of extra cores will perform slightly better on the PII. The difference is not that perceivable in day to day use either way. AM3 as a platform is cheaper than 1156.

Sorry I neglected to ask -- what are you going to be using this for?

30+ browser tabs and 20+ images loaded in photoshop at once

Go AMD. Brute force.
DDR3 memory might make a noticeable increase in loading speed for that stuff too.

You need raw CPU power, not extra cores. Go Intel. Browsers are almost entirely single-tasked, even when they support multiple cores (kind of hard to browse multiple websites at the exact same time :P). Photoshop is pretty terrible at using multiple cores as well, especially anything over 4.

It mostly depends on what you are planning on doing, if the applications you use can take advantage of six cores. I think most games tend to favor the i5/i7 slightly, but since most games are GPU limited the difference is small.

Based on the reviews I've read the AMD X6's are pretty much equal to the lowend i7's. If i was going to choose between a AM3 X6 and the i5-750 at stock speeds, I would take the AM3 hexcore. If you are considering overclocking, that would make it a tougher decision.

When you say prices are same- are the motherboards you plan on using the same price and have the same feature set as well?

It's not that it's a gimmick, it's that the i5 is fast enough that even when switching between threads, it can still keep up.

I vote "Phenom II" because the name sounds cooler than "i5 750."

i5. Not only will it probably perform about the same or better, it'll suck less power while doing so.

This is bogus. Photoshop has supported multithreading for many operations for well over a decade. Some operations are inherently difficult or impossible to parallelize, while others are easy (such as most filters). Photoshop processes images in chunks or tiles. If you have one CPU, it'll process them serially. If you have more than one, it'll spawn a thread per CPU that's available. So things like filters, say a guassian blur, will be multithreaded. If you jump from 4 to 8 cores the best case will be twice as fast. In practice there might be other bottlenecks (memory?) but to say that "Photoshop is pretty terrible at using multiple cores" just isn't true.

I'm willing to bet there are a lot of Intel four core vs AMD six core tests out there for Photoshop that have lead people into thinking that Photoshop doesn't use more than four cores. All this means is that the AMD CPUs suck. I've also seen tests that compare file save/load times, which is silly because it's I/O bound and has nothing to do with the CPU.

What I'm really getting at is that multithreading is multithreading, it doesn't matter if it's two cores or two hundred. If the task is parallelizable, it's no more difficult to "take advantage" of six cores than four or two.



There's plenty of content that runs and wastes CPU cycles without the user's interaction. JavaScript, Flash, Java applications. You can block these but most people don't, especially since there are legitimate applications that are part of the user experience. I'm not suggesting he needs many cores to browse the web, just that things DO happen in other tabs that you have open. It's one of the reasons Firefox is so dog slow compared to Chrome or (sometimes) IE8, because something running in another tab will bind up the UI in the current tab you're using.

I bought the i5 quad core. Thanks for the last minute debate.

[Edit: nevermind, misread a post]

Good call, Dash_rendar. The extra cores won't matter for a long time, and by the time they do you'll be upgrading to an extra 28 cores (not 2.) You'll be happy with the i5.

I can buy the 4v6 debate, but it still stands that Photoshop is pretty terrible at multithreading anyway, regardless of the inability to parallelize some tasks. I'm not really jumping on Photoshop, I'm just making a point that raw CPU would better fit Photoshop in the long run.



Most of this stuff pauses in the background, however, especially Flash. For example, if you're playing a video on youtube, you can see the CPU usage is much higher when the tab is active, but drops significantly when it's no longer visible. The impact isn't really significant, and even dual cores can handle that with ease

LONG STORY SHORT THOUGH: Get Intel.

They're right, I found some good resources on overclocking the i5, 3.5 Ghz seems to be the norm.

Of course, because it's no longer drawing to the screen. But it's easy for wayward applications to run in a tight loop or otherwise do something stupid that can slow or halt the rest of the browser.

I think he would've been happy with either and not been able to perceive a difference really

i5 is a solid choice

Giddy time before my parts come!!!!! :XD::XD: So how much of a difference will I notice running windows 7 on an i5 w/ 4gb of ram as compared to the XP i'm currently running on my 3200+ Athlon / 1 GB? ^_^

About this big: |--------------------------------------------------|

Is that to scale?

No, here it is adjusted for scale: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

ah i see thanks

The difference will be amazing. I went from a 4800 to this system, which is almost exactly like yours, and was ****ing blown away.
Also 7 takes a bit of getting used to, I had a head start because I was in the beta, but once you get used to it the new features are awesome.
Jump lists
Also I have mine OCed to 3.0 Ghz on the stock cooler with crap fans on case, internet reports 3.5 -3.8 without ****ing with voltages, and 4.0 max.