Question Upgrading from a Haswell Refresh i5 to a used Haswell i7.

[yeti_yeti]

Good Day, everyone!
As stated in the title, I currently have a bit of a debate of whether or not to upgrade. I'm currently using an i5 4460, that I purchased used and It's holding up really well so far.
A friend of mine is offering me his used i7 4770(non-k) for about a 100 Euros (roughly 110 US dollars). I'm not in a dire need of a cpu upgrade but his offer is quite a bit cheaper than the online listings. What are your thoughts about this purchase?
Any help greatly appreciated

 

[hftvhftv]

I would say no, as 100 euros is quite steep for a 4770, non K. I'd suggest saving your money up for a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. If you can get it for 50 euros or so maybe then I'd spring for it but gaining hyperthreading isn't going to improve performance significantly.

 

[yeti_yeti]

Thank you for your reply
I'm not planning for a major pc upgrade right now so I'm not really saving up for anything. I had the same thought as you, namely that extra 400 mhz and HT are likely not going to change much. I might convince him to set the price a bit lower and give it another thought. Regardless, thank you for your input.

 

[faalin]

i5 4460
4 core 4 thread
3.2ghz 3.4ghz boost
6MB smartCache

i7 4770
4 core 8thread
3.4ghz 3.9ghz boost
8 MB smartCache

The extra .5ghz and extra threads will help for gaming, if your not looking to upgrade to anything newer for a while. But if your happy with what you have then just save your money.

 

[yeti_yeti]

Thank you for your reply
From what I've seen, the i7 rarely hits the actual advertised 3.9 turbo. It usually hovers between 3,750 and 3800 Mhz during gaming loads. I'm not planning to upgrade for the next 2 years but I'm fairly content with the performance I'm getting out of that i5. Do you think it's a reasonable deal for 100 Euros, or should I try to pull the price down a bit?
Cheers

 

[Gmoney06ss]

I just did a quick eBay search and it looks like the average selling price of the non k is about $100usd max. With prices varying from $70-120. The k is going for roughly $10-20 more. So while not a terrible deal, it's not the best price. Try and talk him down, I'd say 70 max, especially since you said your still happy with what you have.

 

[yeti_yeti]

Well, in my country, they are a bit more expensive, ranging anywhere from 110 to 150 Euros. I'll try and convince him to lower the price a bit.
Cheers

 

[Solandri]

You need to ask yourself if the things you do with your computer will benefit from the slightly higher speed, L3 cache, and hyperthreading on the i7. if you encode videos or do scientific processing of large data sets, then yes I absolutely would say upgrade. If you game, you need to look up benchmarks for the games you most play to see if / how much they benefit from hyperthreading. But for the vast majority of user tasks, the small benefit of an i7 simply isn't worth the extra cost. All it does is give you peace of mind that you have "the best".

That said, the proper way to calculate the price for the upgrade isn't how much your friend is willing to sell his i7 for. It's how much it'll cost you to get the i7, minus how much you can make selling your i5. Looking on eBay, your i5 is selling for about $55. Using the 1.3x scaling factor you gave for the i7, it'll be about 70 Euros. So you'd be getting the i7 upgrade for a net 30 Euros. Which is cheap enough that I'd say go ahead and upgrade, even if all it'll get you is peace of mind. If you can talk your friend into coming down in price, then all the better.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Selling your old one as stated above, is what you need to do to offset the price of the upgrade.
If you like gaming and things are a bit slow, this is the only upgrade you can do before an entire computer upgrade (unless you buy the K version)
I think this is your safest route. Don't expect miracles, but it can only be better, especially now many games need the 4c/8t to run well.
The other thing you can do to make your computer run better is install an SSD - which is normally the biggest bonus when you have a PC.

 

[yeti_yeti]

I'm sorry for not keeping up with the thread and not responding. Thank you Electro and Solandri for your informative responses, I'll likely purchase the cpu in the coming weeks for about 80 Euros, which should be a decent deal according to you guys. As far as SSDs go, I'm already rocking one, however I'm planning to purchase another one in the near future because of how cheap they have gotten.
Cheers