Going from i5-750 to i7-920

[simviatoR]

Prices aside, are there any noticeable differences in gaming in this swap?

I suspect for most games the i5-750 would perform just as good as the i7-920, however I think FSX (Flight Simulator X) could really benefit from the "extra" cores, through hyperthreading, texture wise.

 

[EarthDog]

I cant imagine any changes in gaming at this time. Im not sure how FSX would respond to the i7's HT.

 

[simviatoR]

Yeah - I'm gonna go for it for 2 reasons .. it's not going to cost me any $, and by selling my i5 setup to a friend, I'll be able to get myself the 5870.

secondly, the x58 will support the i9 when it eventually comes out.

 

[EarthDog]

If its a cheap upgrade, why not...! I would be interested to see the benches from the i5 to i7 setup though, that is, with the same GPU just to see the effect HT has on the game.

 

[simviatoR]

Yeah - I'll do some tests.. won't be for a while though, gonna need to wait til next week to pick up a 6gb ddr3 kit

 

[psionic98]

test with both sets of ram if you can, then you'll see your biggest increase once you pop in teh trichannel set!

 

[simviatoR]

Just need to figure out whether to go with the EVGA X58 SLI or ASUS P6T

 

[Aynjell]

If its a cheap upgrade, why not...! I would be interested to see the benches from the i5 to i7 setup though, that is, with the same GPU just to see the effect HT has on the game.

Kingpin came to the conclusion that it was only about 200 points in 3dmark vantage, if I recall even with SLI. A single card comes out to be faster, from what I recall (on the P55 platform).

If you're not going SLI, it's better to go with an 860, if you ask me.

 

[EarthDog]

Ok...... but we are talking about a specific game, FSX, that relies quite heavily on the CPU (clocks and cores), not synthetic benches like Vantage.

However I do in fact see the merit in a drop in 860 as I recall triple channel memory not having much of an improvement over dual.

 

[Aynjell]

Ok...... but we are talking about a specific game, FSX, that relies quite heavily on the CPU (clocks and cores), not synthetic benches like Vantage.

However I do in fact see the merit in a drop in 860 as I recall triple channel memory not having much of an improvement over dual.

Yes, I know what I'm talking about, though.

The 860 has hyperthreading, and all the features available in i7, aside from triple channel which provides little tangible impact.

In fact, the benefits outweigh the negatives when using i5 with a single card. With SLI, the benefits are there, but may still be called negligible.

I see no reason to go i7 unless you want 12GB of RAM and want to run dual cards in SLI (x2's, 295, etc).

 

[jaymz9350]

Ok...... but we are talking about a specific game, FSX, that relies quite heavily on the CPU (clocks and cores), not synthetic benches like Vantage.

However I do in fact see the merit in a drop in 860 as I recall triple channel memory not having much of an improvement over dual.

Does FSX support more than 4 threads? If not I wouldn't think HT would be any benefit. (Kind of a question as well as I've never dealt with HT)

 

[EarthDog]

After some quick googling....

Well I tested again, and I get 50% utilization with HT enabled and 100% without, so that appears to prove HT is not used, but when enabled I do get slightly better performance. I'm just amazed i7 can load textures as well as it does on only 4 threads.

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=10082

maybe b/c the system is using the HT cores instead???

 

[freeagent]

Latency is what triple channel is good at, besides bandwidth..

Its the "snappiness" of your system

The AMD guys know what im talkin about

 

[Bobnova]

HT allows the cpu to deal with the windows background programs on clock cycles when it would otherwise be waiting for a thread with a cache miss to get it's data from ram. Otherwise windows and FSX are fighting over the four available cores.

 

[simviatoR]

I have already set up my i7-920 on EVGA SLI board.

One question though, what is the normal idle temp for stock clocks? I'm seeing 38-40*c

 

[jason4207]

Latency is what triple channel is good at, besides bandwidth..

Its the "snappiness" of your system

The AMD guys know what im talkin about

I thought latency was worse in triple-channel than in dual-channel on i7.

Bandwidth is higher, but I also thought they showed that it didn't really help in anything except Everest benchmark.

 

[fire2havoc]

You probably won't notice a difference in gaming. Maybe 1-2fps at most.

 

[Malakai]

HT rarely if ever helps a games FPS. More often than not, your fps will take a tiny hit with hyperthreading enabled vs disabled.

Going from i5 to i7 @Same clock speeds will almost certainly provide zero benefit. Perhaps a tiny boost going from dual to triple channel ddr3, but even then probably no change.

Only gaming benefit between i5 and i7 is the fact that the i5 arch only supports 1 x16 pcie, or 2 x8. But since as of yet, no video cards are bottlenecked at x8 signaling yet, the only reason youd need i7 is to run 3 video cards. And 3 cards is just nuts, get 2 fast cards, more than that is just silly