[QUOTE=axn;283673]Why is your family against it?


How much does this one cost (excluding the monitor)?[/QUOTE]

supposedly $549 my family told me not to go near the top of the line.

yikes i7 for $600 vs. i3 for $550? That's a rip off. If you're on an i3 level of performance then AMD is more competitive... though the i3 might still be better.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;283710]yikes i7 for $600 vs. i3 for $550? That's a rip off. If you're on an i3 level of performance then AMD is more competitive... though the i3 might still be better.[/QUOTE]

wow this cheap monitor is big 20" and it's a i3 2130 64 bit os and 8 gb of DDR3 ram. still might get my stuff off the old system ( my mom may use it). and a 1.5 TB hard drive when even on my old one I only used 60 GB all together. though that may have climbed with me recording some test in ggnfs. and it already helped me set up my printer , my sister who I told off helped me set it up after I apoligized because of the stress of what felt like 20 near accidents going to my father's and back and dealing with him.

well i don't know about the rest, but that i3 seems like around 1/2 of a 2500 or 2600, so not too bad overall.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;283733]well i don't know about the rest, but that i3 seems like around 1/2 of a 2500 or 2600, so not too bad overall.[/QUOTE]

it's a 3.4 GHz processor the highest I've ever seen.

Take a 2600, take out half the cores, and then give it the per-core L3 cache of a 2500 (1.5 MB as opposed to 2 MB) and you get this. Clock speed and hyperthreading are otherwise identical to 2600.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;283738]Take a 2600, take out half the cores, and then give it the per-core L3 cache of a 2500 (1.5 MB as opposed to 2 MB) and you get this. Clock speed and hyperthreading are otherwise identical to 2600.[/QUOTE]


my lowest windows experience score now is 5.2 I wasn't even a 3 before.

[QUOTE=science_man_88;283677]my family told me not to go near the top of the line.[/QUOTE]

Sigh! I take it that, your family didn't _specifically_ tell not to go for the i7 2600?

The advice of "don't go for top of the line" is given because, typically, there is a _big_ price difference between the top-of-the-line and a middle-of-the-road one, with only a few % of extra performance. Typically.

But in this case, there would be a nearly 2x performance difference for very little price difference. It is a no-contest -- the i7 wins hands down.

Le sigh! If it is not too late (it probably is), give the i3 back and get the i7.

In august I bought a Core i5 2500K, and I still think it is the best tradeoff between speed and price. For Prime95 there is no need to go to the hyper-threaded i7 (since hyperthreading often doesn't do much for Prime95).

[QUOTE=axn;283746]Sigh! I take it that, your family didn't _specifically_ tell not to go for the i7 2600?

The advice of "don't go for top of the line" is given because, typically, there is a _big_ price difference between the top-of-the-line and a middle-of-the-road one, with only a few % of extra performance. Typically.

But in this case, there would be a nearly 2x performance difference for very little price difference. It is a no-contest -- the i7 wins hands down.

Le sigh! If it is not too late (it probably is), give the i3 back and get the i7.[/QUOTE]

I'm fine with it just got Pari to with maximum memory print all primes under 1 million in 624 ms and I think I'll still have room with 8 GB of ram even if I use the maximum for everything.

[QUOTE=patrik;283773]In august I bought a Core i5 2500K, and I still think it is the best tradeoff between speed and price. For Prime95 there is no need to go to the hyper-threaded i7 (since hyperthreading often doesn't do much for Prime95).[/QUOTE]

The i5-2500K overclocks very well. I had two of them at 5.0 Ghz and 5.1 Ghz respectively, using just a megashadow air cooler.

[URL]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835242004[/URL]

The i7-2600K gives off a great deal more heat, mostly because hyperthreading really makes the CPU work so much harder. You need at least a dual-radiator system to get at or near 5.0 Ghz with the i7-2600K (if you intend to use all 8 hyperthreads at this speed.)

The i7-2700K is the best of both worlds. It has a lower heat profile than the 2600K yet it also has hyperthreading. The architecture is also improved, and a 5.0 GHz i7-2700K performs better than a 5.25 GHz i7-980x chip.

[QUOTE=SaneMur;283821]The i5-2500K overclocks very well. I had two of them at 5.0 Ghz and 5.1 Ghz respectively, using just a megashadow air cooler.

[URL]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835242004[/URL]

The i7-2600K gives off a great deal more heat, mostly because hyperthreading really makes the CPU work so much harder. You need at least a dual-radiator system to get at or near 5.0 Ghz with the i7-2600K (if you intend to use all 8 hyperthreads at this speed.)

The i7-2700K is the best of both worlds. It has a lower heat profile than the 2600K yet it also has hyperthreading. The architecture is also improved, and a 5.0 GHz i7-2700K performs better than a 5.25 GHz i7-980x chip.[/QUOTE]Yikes that thing is massive. No way it would fit in my case.

How does the 2700 produce less heat? And why would HT make so much more heat? It's only around 5% transistor duplication, I remember reading...

HT is a way of keeping bits of the processor from idling because the instruction stream doesn't have enough work for them; so it makes significantly more use of the transistors and thus you get significantly more power used.

I don't think that the 2700K differs from the 2600K architecturally - it's the same D2 stepping of the chip.

I'm loving this computer already ( though the Norton free trial has already told me prime95 took over 1 CPU ) but that doesn't bug me yet as it's done almost 3 % and it's been less than 24 hours so if it completes that it'll be able to do a full LL in the range I'm in ( admittedly the 2 I had in 46M) in about 1 month so with both cores and 4 GB ram usage I can possibly do up to 24 LL a year, while helping out on other things. Oh and I figured out my multilingual keyboard so I can use 1 key for up to 6 characters.

[QUOTE=fivemack;283918]HT is a way of keeping bits of the processor from idling because the instruction stream doesn't have enough work for them; so it makes significantly more use of the transistors and thus you get significantly more power used.
[/QUOTE]
I don't think this applies for Prime95 usage though -- it's 100% on all cores/threads either way.