PC rebuild Intel i5 v i7

[Steve Foster]

Hi guys,

Time for the technical experts to have their say, as Windows 7 is soon to start landing on our doormats where would you go if building a brand new rig for it?

I've pretty much made up my mind on getting a couple of Corsair P128 Solid State Drives, one for the OS and one for FSX, but what board/processor combination would you go for:

Intel i5 (LGA 1156) versus Intel i7 (LGA 1366)?

If I was going for the i7 board then the processor would be a 920 2.66GHz D0

or for the i5 board it would be?an i5 750 2.66GHz.

I have seen a number of reviews stating that the i5 processor can out perform the i7, but I don't think you can overclock the i5 like the i7.

Once I have decided upon what processor socket to go for I can start researching the rest. I'm not intrested in running more than one graphics card as FSX won't benefit from it.

I'd be intrested in your thoughts.

Regards,

Steve.

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Steve-

(I've moved your post to the General Forum, so others can see it, and check out further replies as well).

I fully believe the best bang-for-the-buck today are the i7 950 or i7 870, depending on what your target PC is. I did some research and posted some thoughts in my blog, at http://lkalamaras.blogspot.com for the readers' benefit...

Hope this helps!

[Steve Foster]

Lefteris,

Thank you for a very interesting Blog - a great read and very informative.

I seem to be angling towards a 1366 board and now I face one big question:

Does the 950 3.06 give such a big perfomance improvement over a 920 2.66GHZ to justify paying almost twice the price?

In the UK I can get a 870 2.93 or a 950 3.06 for almost the same price, round about ?400, so that doesn't favour one over the other much. The 920 2.66GHz though is around ?210.

I'm looking at building a pure FSX machine really because whatever hardware I put in this can easily cope with any other mundane tasks I will be doing.

As far as I can tell from looking at a friends RC version of Win 7 when you set up different profiles and switch between them applications from the other profile are not kept running in the background, so a clean profile purely for FSX should keep down the amount of things running in the background and should ensure that FSX can run as well as possible.

Regards,

Steve.

[Guest Paul Smith]

I couldn't tell what date this was originally posted so sorry if i'm digging up a really old thread!

Steve:

I was wondering if you went with the SSD's in your re-build and whether you find their performance better / worse / same as your 'old fashioned' HD's?

Cheers

Paul

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Lefteris,

Thank you for a very interesting Blog - a great read and very informative.

I seem to be angling towards a 1366 board and now I face one big question:

Does the 950 3.06 give such a big perfomance improvement over a 920 2.66GHZ to justify paying almost twice the price?

In the UK I can get a 870 2.93 or a 950 3.06 for almost the same price, round about ?400, so that doesn't favour one over the other much. The 920 2.66GHz though is around ?210.

I'm looking at building a pure FSX machine really because whatever hardware I put in this can easily cope with any other mundane tasks I will be doing.

As far as I can tell from looking at a friends RC version of Win 7 when you set up different profiles and switch between them applications from the other profile are not kept running in the background, so a clean profile purely for FSX should keep down the amount of things running in the background and should ensure that FSX can run as well as possible.

Regards,

Steve.

Steve,

as you said, the pick of the moment would be the 920, as price-wise, it's a lot cheaper (and you can always upgrade when the 950-960 come down in price later).

Best,

[Steve Foster]

Hi,

In the end I went with a 920 which I have had running perfectly stable at 4.0 ghz, but at the moment have slowed it back slightly to 3.2 ghz. As for the HD's in my system I went with Corsair P128 SSD's. Windows 7 didn't do what it says it's meant to do when SSD's are installed and didn't disable indexing or defragmenting so I have done that myself. Performance wise I love them, Windows 7 is running very fast and smooth, boots up much quicker than my other system with standard HD's fitted (in comparrison to Vista anything is much quicker when it comes to booting up).

I do have a slight stutter in my FSX set up somewhere, at the moment i'm having trouble working out why it's doing it, although it's much better than it was originally, one day it just developed a slight pause every 30 seconds or so. Couldn't work out why so wiped FSX and re-installed again, running FSX and re-booting at every stage and it made things much better, work continues in trying to smooth it out all together. I have tried settings as recommended by NickN on SimForums and use enhancer but it still exists. I don't know how to find out if it's the SSD or my configuration thats causing the stutter.

Regards,

Steve.

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

If the stutter is every 30 seconds, I'd venture a guess that you have FSUIPC set up to auto-save your flight?

[Jim Barrett]

If the stutter is every 30 seconds, I'd venture a guess that you have FSUIPC set up to auto-save your flight?

Another possibility is a latency spike thrown at regular intervals by a wireless LAN card. I had this issue in my previous FSX machine, a Core-Duo 2400. I would see intermittent stutters in FSX, but did not realize that they were happening at precise 60-second intervals. That became more apparent when I began to use a high-end audio editing program on the same machine. I was able to track down the offending hardware using a latency checking tool, and it turned out to be my Linksys WLAN PCI card.

Some research via Google showed that this particular card was notorious for causing this problem, but only on certain processor/motherboard combinations. I have since upgraded to an I7-920 computer, with a Gigabyte EX58 motherboard, and Win7 64 bit. It runs FSX and all my add-ons with incredible smoothness and speed. I went with a new WLAN card at the same time, which has no latency issues.

Looking forward to adding the Concorde-X to the hangar soon!

Jim Barrett

[Steve Foster]

Hi,

Cheers guys for your thoughts, don't have a wireless LAN card on this PC, but do have FSUIPC auto save - hadn't even thought of that.

Time for further investigation.

Thanks,

Steve.

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Jim-

might be useful if you posted what latency checking tool you used!

[audiohavoc]

Good choice with the i7 920. I also highly recommend Mushkin memory. I replaced my OCZ Gold memory with 6GB Mushikin 1600Mhz DDR3 and the stock timings are 6-8-6-24-1T. The Mushkin memory finally allowed me to get my i7 920 D0 stable at 4.4Ghz. Also, I am loving my GTX 480 and my Kingston SSD's.

[robertgalp]

Generally speaking, within the same generation Core i7s are better than Core i5s, which are in turn better than Core i3s. Nope, Core i7 does not have seven cores nor does Core i3 have three cores. The numbers are simply indicative of their relative processing powers.

Their relative levels of processing power are also signified by their Intel Processor Star Ratings, which are based on a collection of criteria involving their number of cores, clock speed (in GHz), size of cache, as well as some new Intel technologies like Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading