Core i5/i7- how do they compare to Core 2s?

Buying Dad a new pc. What is the 'new' Core 2, so to speak? Is the i5 the equivalent, or is it the i7?

 

i5 = Cheaper version of i7

Both blow the old Core2's out of the water (depending on what you are doing obviously)

 

Not really worth upgrading to if you already have a Core 2 though.

Unless you're an enthusiast, or you're allergic to money.

i5/i7 aren't really mainstream yet as such. They're more enthusiast CPUs at the moment.

 

We'll the Core i5 is a sort of mid-ranger or it will be if/when intel release the i3's and sure the i5's are much better than Core2's depending on the application of them but they aren't worth it unless you really want one/need one and can spend the money on one.

If i were you i'd stick with a decent Core2 duo or quad (depending on you dads needs) and build a system from there.

 

If I were to buy a new PC now... I would go for one with the i5 CPU or AMD equivalent.

It's new and here to stay, Core2s will be phased out, as well as DDR2 RAM.

 

But at the end of the day what is your dad going to use it for? I mean surfing the web/checking mail/watching the occassional divx and other stuff people mostly do on their pc can be done without problems with a Pentium 4.
At most some simple core cpu to run win7 a bit smoother but much more then that is more for people that want to play hardcore games and high end professional applications so save your money and just buy the cheapest you can find

 

A Core 2 Duo then.

 

The Pentium E5200's are good, as well. It's basically a Core 2 with less L2 cache.

The Core i5/i7 is probably too much for what your dad will be doing, unless he's a gamer or doing heavy calculations.

 

Well, when I refer to Core 2 Duo I generally mean anything Celeron E1200 and up.

 

intel's naming conventions are confusing me

 

Well, he currently had a Pentium 4HT 3ghz thats about 6years old, and now he has an Xbox for gaming.. The core i5 in the shop is about £150 more than a Core2duo, and the i5 sports less hard drive space.

I've always associated Celerons with being utter cack and I really want to go with an Intel Core 2 + processor since I've had good experiences with those and know roughly how they perform. I don't pretend to understand what the hell AMD is doing anymore.

 

Here at least you can not yet buy decent, complete i7 rigs for anything near what they're worth, so if you can just assemble it yourself and save lots of money.
Performancewise Tachikoma already told you, if I find my old benchmarks I'll gladly post them along with my current rigs benches. Old machine was a Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.33GHz, new one a Core i7 920 @ 4.00GHz. The difference is enormous, besides what other people seem to think (for whatever reason). I gave the old rig to my mother who just started enjoying emulation and PC gaming.
Also buy lots of RAM, DDR3 is relatively cheap already, get yourself 6x2Gigs and you'll 'never' have to worry about any memory shortages again. Also many things that involve big files can be done in 10% of the time because the file can reside completely within the RAM instead of being read off the HDD on demand.
EDIT: Crap, it seems I deleted the C2Q pics. Some of my i7 benches from back in April, you can nicely compare the i7/C2Q/C2D machines:

 

12GB of RAM? What on earth is the point of that?

 

6 lots of 2GB Ram is a bit extreme.
Buying 4 lots of 1GB is more than enough for a few years, to be honest, especially if he's not using it for Gaming. But even so, how many games require 4GB of Ram?

 

Again, I do not know what you do with your computers, but as soon as you have anything that involves large files (=heavy use if you want) you will need every gig of ram you can get, period. People, you have multi-core CPUs here, those can do more than one thing at a time. Each one of those things needs RAM. Run a few things that need a few gigs each and you'll see how far you come with your 4 gigs Besides, I'm currently still on the 7 RC, in idle (= watching the Simpsons while browsing exactly two tabs in Firefox with 2 .txt documents open) I have 0% CPU usage but 15% RAM usage (=1.82GB). Great, so you've got only 2 Gigs available for anything that needs power and RAM... yeah, great. Let's see you play AC2, MW2 and next year's games with that, especially while maybe still trying to use the computer for something different than gaming, while gaming at the same time.
Get over yourselves, I bet you're the same people that still use XP and want to keep it until 3025, with <4 Gigs of RAM because, well, 4 Gigs is enough. Must be enough. For some reason I don't understand. Go x64.
You don't buy 40GB HDDs anymore either, do you?

Take 12 Gigs, substract the idle 2 Gigs used, you 'only' got around ten gigs left to work with.
Then maybe watch a 1080p movie and your usage goes up too. Or browse Firefox with many tabs, you can easily get to >1GB of RAM for that.
I've started trying to learn programming, and since I like to collect quite many things I built an application to keep track of my collections.
I've often seen that moving around many large files on HDDs tends to lead to (hopefully minor) corruption among those files, so I compress and split my files up into smaller files (more or less like in the warez scene). Then I create .par2 files in order to be able to restore broken/corrupted files to their original state.
If you have many things (like Dreamcast GD-ROM dumps) you'd need to do that for it becomes quite a hassle. So I automatized that, but that's exactly one of the scenarios where you have massive speed gains with more RAM.
Take any application that needs to handle many or big files and do something with them and you come to that situation. Or just play Crysis.
Or 360 like I will now, at least you don't have to worry about RAM there.

 

1.82 GB only for that? I'm using Windows 7 RTM (x64 version) here, I'm running Firefox with 4 tabs, Thunderbird with 3 tabs, Live Messenger and Songbird playing music with 2 tabs open and and my RAM usage doesn't reach 1.10 GB! You're having an important memory leak somewhere if you ask me.

Back to the topic, 12GB still makes no sense (unless you're into audio, video, 3D design or similar stuff), you just don't play 2 games at the same time and most of the people (not in my case ) doesn't even use more than 2 or 3 programs at the same time. For the moment you'll really need 12 gigs you'll probably have to upgrade the rest of the computer too.

If you're looking for good performance and want to forget about RAM for a while you should go for a high speed kit of 4 or 6 gigs, Corsair's XMS and Dominator series are some reliable, quick and not so expensive models.

 

I think that instead of spouting all this hot air you should check how much of that RAM actually gets used in your hypothetical "playing Crysis whilst watching a 1080p movie whilst compressing the contents of your HDD", which incidentally isn't a particularly meaningful benchmark in the first place.

The money you'd spend on 12GB of RAM would be better served elsewhere.

 

Nothing wrong with those specs, I currently use the same HT 3GHz P4 with 4gb of ram with XP and its just fine for my use.
I don't game on my pc just have massive amount of applications/windows open and i watch the occassional movie on it, plus never shutdown the pc as it serves as a server and so on.. and thats all with no slowdowns whatsoever.
If your P4 is slow then you probably need to reinstall windows as its cluttered with crap by now.

I also own a core 2 laptop and as a 'normal' user (meaning not playing the latest games on it) I see almost no difference.
Back in the days I used to buy the latest cpu's and hardware, which now seems like a big waste of money.

 

Get a E5200, 4GB of RAM and a motherboard. That'll cost less than £150. Plus other stuff you need that can't be salvaged.

And port187, don't compare your P4 to your laptop Core 2. It's not really fair, let alone how much better desktop Core 2 are over P4.

 

I'm not comparing performance/benchmarks and whatnot here, I am just saying that if I just use it for surfing and checking mail I don't notice any difference whatsoever.
True, if I would like to run vista/windows7 on both with all the graphics crap enabled I probably would notice the difference.
But as we are talking about somebody's father here (no insult intended) my best guess is that he would not do much more then that on his pc, so why buy a new one when you can perform a clean install and enjoy it for a couple of years more?

Maybe I am getting too old for these specs talk :110: