Affentitten Posted August 5, 2009 Share Posted August 5, 2009 Due to the untimely demise of my last desktop, I am in the market for a new PC. (ie. Not a Mac). The question is, what processor should I be looking at? Do I go up in price to an i7 or go budget with a Core 2? Or in the middle with a Quad Core? I obviously do play games but not extreme MPGs with insane frame rates. More likely to be the latest Total War or something. Aside from that it's basic home office use and porn surfing. Any recommendations? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted August 5, 2009 Share Posted August 5, 2009 The i7 is quite a bit faster at the same clock than Core2. The biggest advantage is that the DDR3 desktop board with their 6 slots can go to 12 GB RAM today and to 24 GB when the modules are available, compared to 8 GB with the DDR2 platforms. If you happen to have memory-intensive applications (game and desktop apps generally are not), an i7 with it's integrated memory controller will completely wipe out any Core2 with the memory controller on the chipset. Quad cores as such don't buy you that much. I would still go with clockspeed or raw processor speed first, then cores. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RSColonel_131st Posted August 6, 2009 Share Posted August 6, 2009 In my opinion as an "frequent, but not fanatical" gamer, i7 is top performance, but not very good at price/performance comparisons. And I don't know any normal app (besides video encoding, heavy photo editing or such) that currently needs more than 4GB ram. Tom's Hardware did a good article on gaming CPU for money. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu,2359-5.html For me, next buy is going to be a Phenom II X4 995. If it has to be an intel for you, look at the C2Q9950, forget the "Extreme Editions" too. I wouldn't go Dual Core today (except if you can get really a lot more clockspeed for same price) since even a dual-core enabled game might be happy if windows runs on the third core. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lets_All_Fight Posted August 13, 2009 Share Posted August 13, 2009 I built a core I7 machine (920,) with 6gb of ddr3 @ 1600 back in March. I love it. One of these days I'm going to overclock it up over 3ghz but, to be totally honest, its eaten every game I've thrown at it alive without me doing anything. well, everything except IL2: 1946 which gave it indigestion - but I've been told thats a vista 64 issue. It might not be the cheepest cpu out there but it's ace. And it's hyperthreaded so you can pretend to have 8 cores! Well, it impresses me anyway. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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