I7 or I5 processor - Laptop

[MarkieMark]

Should I get the I5 or the I7 processor in my laptop as there is £140 difference: The I5 processor is I5-2450M and the I7 is I7-3612. I will be playing games like The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 and the Laptop will have 8GB RAM and a Graphics Card AMD Radeon HD 7670M inside. Could you tell me which to get? The I5 is a Sandy Bridge and I7 Ivy Bridge, I5 - 2.5GHz I7 - 2.1GHz but both can go upto 3.0GHz Many Thanks

[Azunite]

You wouldn't need the i7.

[MarkieMark]

You wouldn't need the i7. Would it be worth getting it just incase I ever did?

[Dark_Desires]

I agree with Azunite.The i7 is a i5 with hyperthreading and a biger cache.A i5 for gaming is the most u will but if u are doing heavy video rendering in 720p+ or other heavy editing get a i7.And even still the i5 is fine for that process and i7 go in very high end heavy desktops so just get the i5 its a better choice unless u do what i said its used for.

[Azunite]

Would it be worth getting it just incase I ever did?

If you want to play state-of-the-art games, then buy it. But since you indicated the price difference and said that you'd be playing Sims, then I thought you would want the i5.

[azorne]

I don't think you'll need hyperthreading. I run MCMC simulations because I'm doing some college courses, and I still don't use it often...though I have CUDA if I really require that kind of power.

[Cognizant]

You really don't need that "oomph" of extra power from the i7, the i5 would work quite well for your purposes

[Steve Jobs]

Money better spent on a solid state drive, if you're asking me.

[azorne]

Yeah, that's a much better idea, or more RAM in your case.

[Aves]

I have a laptop with an i5 processor and only an Intel HD 4000 and it runs games pretty smooth, you should be fine.

[HunterSteele]

Would it be worth getting it just incase I ever did?
Sure. You can brag about having one.

Money better spent on a solid state drive, if you're asking me.
Why? They're faster, but smaller, more expensive, and have a shorter lifespan. Not a good tradeoff. If you really want to waste some money, get a touch screen overlay to turn your monitor into a touch screen. Then your friends will be really impressed.

[Giles]

You should never actually need an I7, unless you intend to do some pretty ridiculously intensive things with the laptop. So you're almost always better off getting an I5 and spending the extra money on a better system in other areas.

[Axw_JD]

i7 all the way. As more and more games start supporting multiple cores, and with Windows 8 the OS itself manages the cores more efficiently, you'll see the gain on the multithreading of the CPU (8 threads vs 4).

[Telkanis]

Money better spent on a solid state drive, if you're asking me.

I completely agree, most demanding games won't even use hyper threading and unless you are connecting it to a screen with crazy high resolution you won't notice a difference. I just built a new computer and went with the i5 for that reason and I had looked over a ton of comparison reports. But a solid state drive is worth it. This is my first computer with a SSD and it's amazing.

[Axw_JD]

I completely agree, most demanding games won't even use hyper threading and unless you are connecting it to a screen with crazy high resolution you won't notice a difference. I just built a new computer and went with the i5 for that reason and I had looked over a ton of comparison reports. But a solid state drive is worth it. This is my first computer with a SSD and it's amazing.

The game itself won't call for HT. It will simply split up different stuff to different processes, and the more processes the CPU can handle in parallel, the better. Also, the more processes your computer can handle, the more responsive it will be regardless of what kind of application you are throwing at it.

SSDs for gaming are worthless right now. Shorter load times are certainly not worth the premium, neither is the faster boot up process (specially with Windows 8's 7 second boot up on HDDs in the horizon). I personally have an SSD for my desktop (along with an HDD for actual storage) and the benefits gaming-wise are marginal. A better CPU, GPU or RAM is 99% of the time more important for gaming performance.

If using it for work though, that is really nice. Compiling a big project from an SSD feels faster, and so does starting heavy applications that load a ton of stuff up front (like an IDE, or Photoshop and the likes)

One last thing: On a laptop, the CPU is the least likely component to be easily replaced later on. If you want to upgrade to an SSD later down the road you can do it without any problems. Doing the same to the CPU is not so easy, or cheap.