Why does everyone recommend i7-920?

[Pycno]

Why does everyone recommend i7-920 and not i5-750?

i7 920 has:
Triple Channel Memory (no performance gain in games)
Hyper Threading (no performance gain in games)
Dual x16 PCIe (performance gain only when using SLI/Crossfire

i5 750 has:
TurboBoost (performance gain in games)

Maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture, but for me it seems the 750 actually is better for gaming when using a single GPU?

[Freddie]

Turbo boost is a kind of automatic overclocking that happens when only a couple of physical cores are being used. It has little or no effect if:

-- you overclock manually (which many people here do) or

-- you are running five WoWs (because in that case, all cores are getting used).

People sometimes say turbo boost is good for games because they assume (1) that you're running one instance of a game and very little else (2) that the game can't make heavy use of multiple cores. The first assumption doesn't apply here.

The i5 750 doesn't compare very well to the i7 920. The non-Bloomfield chip that compares most directly is the i7 860.

[Pycno]

Yeah, TurboBoost will not increase performance when boxing or utilizing all cores. My impression is still that a 920 is suited for work/applications and 750 is the gaming chip.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/compare,1401.html?prod[2617]=on&prod[2884]=on

Core i7-920
Left 4 Dead FPS 146

GTA IV 1.0.3 FPS 60

Far Cry 2 1.0.1 FPS 108

Core i5-750
Left 4 Dead FPS 158

GTA IV 1.0.3 FPS 60

Far Cry 2 1.0.1 FPS 103

[Freddie]

Running five instances of a game is very different from running one instance, and each game is different. It's not possible to generalize from benchmarks of single instances of other games to running multiple instances of WoW.

In general, i5 750 is less powerful than i7 920. Like I said earlier, the non-Bloomfield chip that compares most directly to i7 920 is i7 860.

It would be interesting to see benchmarks of five WoWs on i5 750, i7 860, and i7 920.

[Pycno]

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/lynnfield/review/wow.png
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634&p=8

That settles it for me, Im grabbing a i7 930.

[universal]

when you've got it could you try if hyperthreading has a positive or negative effect on performance? if i remember the benchmarks from gtaIV correctly hyperthreading had a negative effect there. Would be interesting imo if that's the case for multiple WoW instances too :)

[Ualaa]

Someone posted that hyperthreading actually hurt performance in warcraft.

I decided to disable the logical cores in IS Boxer Toolkit, and only run with the physical cores as an experiment. IS Boxer labels the cores 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8... where 1 is what most refer to as core 0 etc. So the physical cores are 1, 3, 5 and 7.

Long story short, I personally get slightly better performance in warcraft without the logical cores. But the difference is very marginal. And I only tested for a short period one evening. My i7 920, without hyperthreading runs the game quite fine, but it ran it very well with hyperthreading too.

[Khemikal]

The main reason people are recommending the i920/930 over the i5 750 and/or the i7 860 is because of the sockets each comes on. The 750 and 860 are on the 1156 socket. As of right now there have been no announcements of a 6 core chip on the 1156 socket. There are however already engineering samples of the 6 core i7 chip with hyperthreading on the 1366 socket. The NDA lifts on them in the next week (the 10th), so keep a look out for benches. Since we tend to run more than 4 WoWs when we box, it makes sense to plan ahead and go to a platform with a chip that has more than 4 physical cores, and that is what the 6 core chips will give us.

[crebble]

core i7 beats i5 when multiboxing hands down

[universal]

i doubt the six-core will be a viable solution performance/cost wise, since it's the higher end i doubt intel will sell them for below 600$. especially since amd has nothing which comes really near to their performance, but will most likely sell his hexacores in the 200-300$ range, which might make them an interesting choice depending on at which clockrates they will be released.

[Ualaa]

I know a lot of people are on a budget.

But a lot of people will go for the biggest/baddest/fastest etc for their system.

Personally, I stick with what I have, for as long as it can handle what I'm using.
I won't upgrade until something is not working as I'd like it to work.
My Q6600 system was fine, up until epic flyers across my team and mass pvp as a 5-man group.

Once the system is lacking in some regard.
I decide to upgrade.
And will generally go for the best I can afford.
Which would be a 6-core, if they were out, even if a 4-core would probably be enough for my purposes.
I like to go for the best, whenever I upgrade.
Even if I only upgrade when my current system needs it.

[Igg]

X58 chipset will allow you to reach 12gb of ram cheaper,