Core i5-4670K or Core i7-4770K (bios, high end, games)

[piesquared]

Which should I buy? The i5 is at 3.4Ghz while the i7 is 3.5. Also, the i7 is faster, but is it really worth it? I might by a Corsair H100i water cooler to cool the CPU and have a better chance of Overclocking. The i7 is $50 more and I use the PC for animations, video editing, gaming, blu-ray movies, etc. I might buy 2 EVGA GeForce GTX 780s in SLI.

[Skunk Workz]

I haven't looked at the Haswell, but with the Ivy Bridge both K chips perform almost identically in all gaming situations, so for gaming alone the i5 is usually a better value.

For video editing / rendering, if the applications can use the extra HT cores then the i7 makes sense. I went with the i7 since I run a lot of Virtual Machines, and wanted to dedicate cores to the VMs.

Also make sure you are running a Z series board (not an H), and enable the CPU video encoding features in the BIOS to allow the system to hand encoding/ decoding / transcoding functions back to the CPU, and not the GPU.

IMO, water cooling is a waste of money in most cases, especially with the K CPU as you can OC it on air with the flip of a switch.

As for SLI; personally I'd spend the money on a single better card in almost all situations.

[Pruzhany]

For the uses you've listed, I'd go with the i7 (you may be able to save a little by dropping down to the 3770) on a MSI military grade board. 2x GTX 780 6GBs should suffice.

[adyn]

The rest of the build is going to cost 2 grand, why piddle over 50 dollars? Sure you may not use it now, but future proofing is nice.


I'd never buy the i7 cause I only use my PC for games and games and facebook and games, no rendering or anything like that.

[VeeGer]

The difference between an i5 and an i7 is the hyper threading technology in the i7 which is an improvement in performance. For $50 more I'd get it.

I have an i3 system and I did an experiment. I did a benchmark with the HTT enabled and disabled. The is a dual core with HTT and the difference is significant.

By the way, graphical games/applications will benefit from HTT regardless what they say.

[winkosmosis]

I prefer i5 because some programs have problems with the hyperthreaded cores on the i7, especially games.

[GTOlover]

The I-7 2600k I have is going on almost 3 years now. From day 1, I have had it overclocked to 4.2GHz and it has not had a single issue 2600k does NOT support PCI-E 3. Regardless of whether the motherboard supports it or not it is a limitation of the CPU itself. PCI-E 3 video cards will still work, just not at full PCI-E 3 speeds.

I have gotten every single cent that I have put into this little monster. If it weren't the lack for PCI-E support, I would have no reason whatsoever to upgrade anytime soon. The higher end motherboards are getting harder and harder to come by it seems.

But the Ivy bridge I-7 4770K is worth the extra IMO but heck still might have to stick with the Sandy bridge-E 2011 LGA socket and get a i7-4930K Ivy Bridge-E and a X-79 SATA MOBO but the Ivy bridge processors are so much better and I would go with the I-4770K over the I-5 but that is just me.

But then again I was impressed after my BIL asked me to build him a AMD based gaming/entertainment/video editing on a budget build Rig and well the AMD FX 8-core Vishera processor was actually pretty impressive and besides the power it sucked meant that the 1000watt Gold Rated PSU and going with a aftermarket high end water cooling set up ate the the savings on the budget but it was fun since the it changed my mind about AMD's processors and are worth checking out also then again on a $2K gaming build I would still say stick with the 22nm I-5 4670K or if you decide to go for the extra $50 bucks for a I-7 4770K Ivy bridge processor(s).

[emcee squared]

For an extra $50, go with the i7. I, personally, wouldn't drop a few hundred extra dollars (like what is charged to customize online) on it because I'm not a heavy user outside of some games, but for that price, I think it would be worth it.