[SOLVED] Should I upgrade my cpu?

Sep 27, 2019
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I'm currently running a i5-2500 1155 socket cpu (3.3ghz-3.7ghz) and was wondering if would be worth the money upgrading to a i7-3770k cpu (3.5ghz-3.9ghz), the fastest cpu possible for this socket. Is the only difference the 0.2 ghz speed or is there more to the i7 series that i'm not getting?
 
Solution
It's not about "the i7 series". It's about what GENERATION of i7, or i5, or i3, or whatever. Each generation generally sees some kind of improvement.

It might be a bump in clock speed, which gives you faster single core performance and therefore more performance for ALL cores.

It might be the improvement of IPC, or "instructions per clock/cycle". Which is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle


Or it might be the addition of more cores or hyperthreads, which improve multithreaded performance.

In this case, it isn't just the increase in clock speed that makes a difference. Going from your Sandy bridge i5 to an Ivy bridge i7, IF your motherboard supports it, and just because the sockets are the same does not...

R_1

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ok in a nutshell talking about the CPU's for your board, core counts have increased in newer generations and have higher base core counts and higher total thread counts than the chips for your motherboard.
an i3 is half an i7. an i3 has 2 cores with hyperthreading
an i5 is an i7 with out hyperthreading enabled. 4 actual cores can process 4 threads it can process 4 threads faster than the i3 can process 4 the same 4 threads.
the i7 has 4 cores with hyperthreading and can process 8 threads.
the ability to do more work (extra threads) and the extra speed is what makes the i7 worthwhile. for games the difference will be minimal. however gaming AND streaming will now be possible, assuming you get the i7. the i7 is the jewel for multitasking.
 
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It's not about "the i7 series". It's about what GENERATION of i7, or i5, or i3, or whatever. Each generation generally sees some kind of improvement.

It might be a bump in clock speed, which gives you faster single core performance and therefore more performance for ALL cores.

It might be the improvement of IPC, or "instructions per clock/cycle". Which is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle


Or it might be the addition of more cores or hyperthreads, which improve multithreaded performance.

In this case, it isn't just the increase in clock speed that makes a difference. Going from your Sandy bridge i5 to an Ivy bridge i7, IF your motherboard supports it, and just because the sockets are the same does not always mean it will although many motherboards DO support the Ivy bridge CPUs if the originally came with Sandy bridge parts but a BIOS update will usually be necessary, could offer a significant bump in performance because not only are you gaining clock speed and IPC, but also the addition of four hyperthreads.

This is what you'd be looking at, roughly, in terms of gains.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2500-vs-Intel-i7-3770K/803vs2


That's approximately a 49% increase in performance. Now, that won't be all the time, because some of that is due to the addition of the four hyperthreads and there are some games and applications that are not optimized to take advantage of many cores, but you would still likely see about a 10-15% increase in single core performance if the game or application, or whatever process is involved, is only capable of utilizing four cores or less.

So depending on what kind of price you can get that CPU for, it could be well worth it, especially considering that these days the vast majority of software IS well optimized for multithreaded performance.
 
Solution
Sep 27, 2019
2
0
10
It's not about "the i7 series". It's about what GENERATION of i7, or i5, or i3, or whatever. Each generation generally sees some kind of improvement.

It might be a bump in clock speed, which gives you faster single core performance and therefore more performance for ALL cores.

It might be the improvement of IPC, or "instructions per clock/cycle". Which is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle


Or it might be the addition of more cores or hyperthreads, which improve multithreaded performance.

In this case, it isn't just the increase in clock speed that makes a difference. Going from your Sandy bridge i5 to an Ivy bridge i7, IF your motherboard supports it, and just because the sockets are the same does not always mean it will although many motherboards DO support the Ivy bridge CPUs if the originally came with Sandy bridge parts but a BIOS update will usually be necessary, could offer a significant bump in performance because not only are you gaining clock speed and IPC, but also the addition of four hyperthreads.

This is what you'd be looking at, roughly, in terms of gains.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2500-vs-Intel-i7-3770K/803vs2


That's approximately a 49% increase in performance. Now, that won't be all the time, because some of that is due to the addition of the four hyperthreads and there are some games and applications that are not optimized to take advantage of many cores, but you would still likely see about a 10-15% increase in single core performance if the game or application, or whatever process is involved, is only capable of utilizing four cores or less.

So depending on what kind of price you can get that CPU for, it could be well worth it, especially considering that these days the vast majority of software IS well optimized for multithreaded performance.
Thanks very much, this is indeed the difference i was looking for between these two cpu's. Great explanation, this clears thing up really well. I'll be buying it then if my board supports it.