GHZ vs. Thread Count

[mastermansion.mmg]

I'm looking at two CPUs and right now I'm thinking of either the 85 8600k (overclocked) or i7 8700. I'm mostly doing gaming and I may be doing some editing in the future. Which is more important, higher GHZ in the i5 or higher threads in the i7? Also can someone explain what threads are responsible for in terms of function?

 

[Countgreen]

The 8700 has a higher clock speed than the 8600k. For gaming you want a higher clock speed (8700) but the 8600k is still a beast for gaming. Intel has hyper-threading on their i7 cups... Hyper-threading is basically the CPU core being able to do two things at once instead of one. Both will serve you well for gaming and editing.They both have 6 cores but it's down to whether or not you want to pay the extra money for higher clock speeds and hyper-threading.

 

[richiestang_78]

If you don't plan on overclocking you can save money and get the i5-8400 which is a very good deal, or jump to the 8700. And if you don't mind slower RAM speeds you can save money and buy one of the H310 (limited to 2666mhz RAM) motherboards which are cheaper then the Z370 motherboards you'll want to buy if you get a 8600K or 8700K chip.

One thing I would suggest no matter what CPU you get if it comes with a stock cooler, buy even a cheap Cooler Master evo 212, Intel stock coolers are complete garbage.

 

[shmoochie]

Honestly, the only difference between the two is that the i7 will age better than the i5 because of the hyperthreading. They both perform about the same on current games, although you might get 5-10 better fps with the i7 on some games that utilize more cores. However, for current games the general rules is that clock speed>cores, but it looks like more cores will become more important in the near future.