Lets say I got 1000 web pages open and one AAA game running, is 4C and 4T enough?

[matt4x4]

Basically the title says it all.
I have been looking at benchmarks for the different CPU's.
Like an i7-2600 is so close to a i7-3770, always off by 5%. Same goes for the next jump up to i7-4770, and i7-6700. X5650 6C/12T is close to a i7-2600 4C/8T, just better in workstation.

So I've been trying to find a cheap buildup, 1366 HP T3500 mobo ($60) with 100 dollar (cdn) Xeon X5670 6C/12T, or X5672 4C/8T. But for that I can get OC board $170cdn for a P6T (original plain one) and i7-930, or ASUS X58 Rampage 2 i7-930 for $230cdn. Then there is LGA 1155 with i5-2500K P8Z68 Pro for $170. GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 i7-2600K 16GB for $300, complete system for $300, i5-2400 GA-Z68-AP-D3 8GB, 1TB, W7Pro 64bit.

Also I want something that I can just download crap onto. Just music and videos. I know I dont need much cpu power for that.

I had about 100 pages open with World of Tanks going and it crashed last night. World of Tanks was to blame judging from the Event Viewer. What I will do is uninstall the game and reinstall and try to mimick what I had going on. Then look at my cpu and thread cores.

Is there a good program to do that?
Besides Task Manager.
I have used SystemExplorer in the past.
Also I installed MSI Afterburner cuz I wanted FPS overlayed.

 

[synphul]

I'm not familiar with that hp motherboard, just be aware that there are sometimes differences and limitations when dealing with oem boards like that. It's not exactly like an aftermarket asus, gigabyte, msi, asrock etc. It may use a custom bios or have other limiting support/factors involved.

When it comes to 100 webpages open, unless they're actively playing video or flash or something they really don't take up any cpu power. They reside in ram until you click on a link, open or close a tab or interact with it. I'm able to play standalone games (not online mmo but things like fallout, skyrim etc) with 100's of tabs open on chrome without much issue.

The only real issue is ram, you might want to consider 16gb of ram depending on the game in addition to all those web pages open. Even with 8gb of ram what will happen is inactive content from the browser stored in ram will be offloaded to the ssd or hdd to free up memory as needed by the game you're playing. The webpages being open won't have much if any effect from an i5 to i7. They're basically forgotten in the background until viewed/active again.

If you can get the i7 2600k with z motherboard and 16gb of ram for 300, seems like a pretty decent price. Just keep in mind that the 2nd gen i5/i7 are coming up on 5yrs old and many people are replacing them for something newer rather than upgrading to them. They're not bad, oc'd they keep up fairly well for now but not sure how many more years you'll be getting out of them. 2-3yrs and they'll be 7-8yrs old. That's the tradeoff though for those sort of savings, looks like you'd be pressed to get a new 6th gen i5 and motherboard for under $450 cad plus ddr4 ram.