Iris030380 wrote:I had no idea how fast that q8300 actually is. If I took my i3 back to stock speeds (3.06ghz) I think the q8300 is probably on a par with it gaming wise, and most definitely faster than my i3 in multitasking and encoding. Seems he got a really good deal! 😁
Presuming I get any spare money around the holidays I plan to buy an i5-750 and drop it straight into my existing motherboard, selling my i3 for £30-£40 to go towards the cost. I will probably OC the i5 to around 3.8Ghz for stability. This will be the first quad core I have owned. But to be fair, there is nothing out there that this i3-540 @ 4.2Ghz can't handle. I am still GPU limited, and as every game released apart from indie scene are designed for the consoles, upgrading now just seems a total waste of money. I will probably get that i5 and then call it a day. The i5-750 when OC'ed is a fairly large amount faster than this i3-540, but that begs the question, why the hell spend money on a Sandybridge i7? They are insanely fast, and Dishonored runs just fine on any decent 2007 dual core PC. So ... whats the point? Benchmarking? You need more money than sense. Unless you're into video encoding in a big way it's just a total waste of money.
I remember 10-15 years ago, 12 months was a lifetime of improvement and change in the PC world. Not only hardware, but the quality of games/software improved in parallel. These days that's just not the case.
gaming is a weak spot for the q8300, at only 2.3GHz and with only 2MB l2 per die (that's lga 775, so you have FSB, memory controller on the northbridge...); I would expect the i3 540 to be much quicker for gaming, but about on par (maybe slightly slower) for multi threading
as for why would you buy an i7? for gaming is probably wasted money most of the time, that's why most hardcore gamers go with the i5 K.
but for rendering it's much faster thanks to hyper threading...
now dishonored is pretty easy on the hardware, try games like BF3 on MP with 64 players, or GTA 4, or something like Starcraft 2 when there is a huge number of units on the screen.... you will see that is quite easy to justify the need for a really fast quad core if you want high framerate.
things have changed a lot, I think, part of it is the importance of consoles for PC gaming nowadays, most games are multi platform... also games NEED to be compatible with hardware from 6 years ago to reach more buyers... I think the amount of money spent to develop games now is much higher,
RacoonRider wrote:Not long ago I helped set up a computer class with 24 last generation i3's. My 2-year old i5-450M Notebook is much slower, my e6300 at home is ~2-2.5 times slower than my notebook, judging by 3Ds max rendering time. If low-end is so freaking fast, how exactly fast is the high-end?
well, the mobile i5 is also a dual core with HT, just like the i3... a high end CPU is massively faster for multi threading than any i3, but the difference for single-dual thread is not so amazing (well, as long as you don't really overclock the high end CPU)
in MT (for rendering) a new i3 is probably equivalent to a Q6700, for single thread... it's faster than the i7 990x.