- 1). Decide on a budget for your computer. The i5 is set at a mid-range price and the i7 is geared toward high-end or power users and costs up to $800 as of October 2010.
- 2). Determine if you will require extra processing power. Although both processors have the same number of cores, the i7 has a clockspeed up to 700 MHz faster and can have more cache memory. Combined with the additional memory channel, the i7 can significantly increase performance for applications like video or audio transcoding. Software that utilizes hyper-threading will see large boosts when going from the i5 to an i7, according to benchmarks from Tom's Hardware.
- 3). Buy the i5 if you are a gamer or casual user. The i5 is budget-priced and the performance difference is likely to be unnoticeable when playing movies or video games. Most consumer software cannot take full advantage of four cores and hyper-threading.
- 4). Buy the i7 if you use high-performance video editing software, transcoding or other processor-intensive programs. Enterprise products such as Photoshop, design suites or even scientific-analysis software are designed to use as much available processing speed as possible. The i7 will give a boost to video games and other casual use, but at a high price tag for marginal benefits.
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -