Worth going i5 over i3?
 

I just spilled water on my out of date gaming rig and it gave me an excuse to upgrade. I'm right in the middle of partout business so I can spend some decent cash, but I would like to keep it as low as possible since the cash goes towards my next car.

I have to replace my motherboard and videocard. Both got hit with water. The processor is fine but unfortunately it's an old LGA socket 775 motherboard so it's not worth upgrading (It's also DDR2-800 and has a PCI-E x16)

I was browsing around parts websites and I was wondering if it's worth spending 60 dollars more for quad core computing (159.99 core i5 3.3ghz) or a dual core (99.99 core i3 3.1ghz).

The box will be used for light gaming, PS2 emulation (The BIG resource sucker, I'm thinking i5 might be worth it just for that), movies and internet browsing.

I'm trying to keep it under 400, but naturally that's a bit difficult with 3 major components needing replacing.

My list:
-Some sort of socket 1175 MOBO with 4x DDR3 and a PCI-E x16 x2 or whatever the new one is. - 130
-Some sort of videocard (GDDR5, hopefully 1gb) - 140
-Core i3/i5 -(99/159)
-4gb ram - 30

60 over with the i5, but to be honest I'm leaning towards that so I can do it right the first time and not have to redo it in a year.

Thoughts?

I'd definitely consider it worthwhile if building a new machine from scratch.

Question: PS2 emulation? I honestly had no idea that this was practical. If whichever application you are using for this is multi-threaded, then it will benefit from a multi-core CPU.


Just took a quick peek at the PCSX2 install guide- the only reference I can find in it to multi-core operation is applicable only when using Software Rendering, rather than graphics-card acceleration.


Still, it's only $60. Go for it.

AMD and ATI card will be cheaper and work as well or better.

Jeff knows so much about computers that he's functionally a virgin, heed his advice.

This message is Jeff approved. I've always used AMD proc's in my builds with great success.

Have a look at AMD Phenom-2 x4 based setups.

Phenom 555 black, 955 if your looking for a quad core vs dual.

Cheap as hell and easily overclocks to 4.0 on air cooling.

Went i5... Because I've had luck with Intel.

Now loading Windows 7 from a USB DVD drive because I forgot to buy a SATA cd drive.... See y'all in 10 years.

Buy AMD. Support my race car. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.

Ps2 emulation works but it isn't practical. The ps2 is something rediculously low spec like 800mhz and I lagged with a 3ghz C2D. I also did some googling, PCSX2 does support multi-threading, but I don't know how it's going to react to windows 64 bit since I have only ever run 32.

Intel = S2000

AMD = Turbo Miata driven by Hustler after 7 Cappuccinos

Your luck with PS2 emulation will depend on which games you want to emulate. Some are playable, some are not, even if you spend $1500 on two GTX 590s and $1000 on an I7-990x. It just won't matter.

I went with an I7-920 back during thanksgiving of last year, (or was it the year before that?) and this thing will gobble up everything I throw at it. From hosting servers to hardcore gaming to video encoding, it just keeps asking for more.

When building my GF's HP Envy 14, I opted for the I5 over the I3. I am quite impressed with it.

BTW, new specs:
-Core i5 3.2ghz
-Intel DH67CL mobo
-4gb cheapo-ram (DDR3-1333)
-Raedon HD6670

Also got a new PSU in case my old one was blown... Didn't want to spend money I didn't have to replacing everything twice..

Unfortunately this seems to be the case. The videocard doesn't really matter for emulation - it's going to run whatever the games can throw at it because they're so low spec. Where it runs into trouble is the processor, because by emulating you are literally running two operating systems at once, Windows and the PS2. Which is why it sucks down so much processing power.

I figure more-cores and x64 will help significantly with this.

I don't think the ps2 emu took very good advantage of multiple cores IIRC. You'd be pretty well off with a 10GHZ i5.

Makes me think back to the days of overclocking the Pentium D to 4.4ghz with water

It's not because you're running two OSes at once. I've got both XP and Ubuntu running on a pair of virtual machines in the background right now.

It's because emulating hardware is a difficult thing to do. Different architectures. And not just the main CPU, but the GPU as well. Everything has to be translated in realtime. It's like running a program written in Java or Applesoft Basic vs. running real software.

A Pentium 1 running Win2k will "emulate" a 16 Mhz 286 running DOS quite easily, because the instruction sets are compatible. The same machine will struggle to emulate an 8 Mhz Amiga 500.


Or, you know, just buy an actual PS2. $99 at Amazon.

BTW, just noticed your sig. :bowrofl:

Is 64 bit shit still around? I got sucked into it and it's crap. Nothing runs on it. I have to keep my old computer around just for iTunes so I can keep my phone updated. Total lame.

I use to always go AMD. But the latest i7s just seem to take the cake lately. I did go with ATI for my GFX card on my gaming rig.

Works great in windows, but I wanted to try cpyrit with APP but had no luck successfully getting it to work on my Ubuntu setup. My GT250 on the other hand was very simple to shake hands with cyprit and amazingly fast vs my cpu.

What are you running where you can't run 32bit apps as well?

I have had very little trouble with it on my home machine. The only app I couldn't get to run was my old copy of AutoCAD 2005, so I run that in a virtual machine.

We do have a couple of applications I use at work that don't run under x64, as they rely upon a fairly old (and obsolete) .NET library that hasn't been supported for years. We're working on fixing that, until then, I do keep a couple of 32 bit machines around for that purpose.

And of course I still have the one 486 running DOS (yes, actual DOS) as there was never a Windows version of the M-Sys reflash tool created, and we still need to support those damned things every now and then.

I have been running 64bit since xp64 came out. was crap then but once vista 64 was around it was rock on. Biggest problem with 64bit windows is that is you are running the home version it doesn't auto set up 32bit programs to run proper. win 7 64 pro or higher is rock your socks.


i would get AMD and not spend more then $100 on a cpu. Any current gen cpu will work great and there is no need for any of the brand new super speed crap. You will never find your self in a situation where you need the power at home.

i would also get a ATI 69XX in the 2gb range as if your gaming spending your money on a gpu will make everything run better over spend a lot on a cpu.

Would also pick up 8gb of duel or triple channel in the $150 range.

Made a windows 7 bootable USB thingey to install... I'm guessing this is gonna take about 20 minutes now

The sooner everyone is running 64 bit windows, the sooner all your shit will work.

there is only ONE thing I can't do in 64 bit software that is really rather random.

Creo Elements/PRO (nee Pro/ENGINEER) wildfire 3 omits the "generate PDF" function in the 64 bit version. The 32 bit version runs fine on Win7 x64 and will generate PDFs just fine. Only drawback is it doesn't let me run Aero.

I am so convinced by 64 bit OS that I made my wife get her new laptop with it. She's never had a complaint about it. She probably is oblivious to the fact that anything changed.

There's one benefit to the x64 OSes that seems to remain unspoken: support for more than 3.xx gigs of RAM.

I've got 8 GB in my home machine, and I have paging turned off completely. Even with two dozen tabs open in Chrome at any given time and a VM or two running in the background, I have yet to experience a low memory condition.

Well to be fair, many 32bit versions of windows (and most flavors of Linux) actually DO support more than 4gb of memory(3.xx once you factor in video memory) via physical address extension. The only hard limitation is that each process is limited to a 4gb virtual address space.

having reached the memory limit on a 32 bit OS, I'm right there with Joe. Again, Pro/E was my reason for moving to something that could handle more than 4gb of memory for a single process.

Unfortunately the official maximum memory for my thinkpad is 4gb... but unofficially it can work with 8gb.

Eh?

I've got XP Pro 32 / Win7 32 installed on several machines, all of which have either 4 or 5 GB of RAM on them, and none report more than 3.xx GB of RAM usable in the OS. (And no, I am not "sharing" system memory with a video card.)

My desktop machine at work for instance:

Attachment 240821

(does some googling...)

Hmm. Looks like this only works on certain Enterprise / Datacenter editions of Windows, and is limited on client versions "for driver compatibility and licensing reasons, even though these versions do run in PAE mode if NX support is enabled." (source)

Just wanna say that this i5 is awesome... Emulating like a fucking bawse... no lag anywhere... I can run it about twice as fast as normal game speed in turbo mode, which is very helpful since I lost my save games because they were on an IDE drive..