Nemesiae Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 You obviously know more than us. (i5 has 4 cores and it crushes all AMD CPUs, also the intel chips are more efficient with heat, electricity and core speed, regardless of clock) Im done at this point. No person could read this thread and then buy an AMD cpu. And if they do, they deserve it. For info not all i5 have 4 cores some earlier models got only 2 but you could use hyperthreading to thread 2 operation at the same time on each core (the number after the i -which stands for itanium- has nothing to do with the number of cores on the chip ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrumPotte Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 I bought an Imac with an I7 and 8 gig of memory. It has a decent graphics card but is not the most advanced in the world. I run windows 7 under bootcamp to run the pc apps / games. I run at full graphics without an issue and very good frame rate (except on days when the internet is sketchy - but that's a different issue). I think a lot of people focus on the processor and graphics card and forget about things like hard drive cache and file swapping performance. My Imac has a 'fusion' drive which means it uses a flash drive (about 128 gig in size) for file swapping frequently used files rather than the hard drive itself - this increases performance of the Imac dramatically. I think this is the main reason i get good frame rate with this setup. When people find their new computer with I7 doesn't run as well as an old computer with an I5, they might want to consider looking at the hard drive cache as well. I know their is a thread out there on how to setup a ram drive to run swtor - might be worth looking at. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heat-Wave Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 I think a lot of people focus on the processor and graphics card and forget about things like hard drive cache and file swapping performance. My Imac has a 'fusion' drive which means it uses a flash drive (about 128 gig in size) for file swapping frequently used files rather than the hard drive itself - this increases performance of the Imac dramatically. I think this is the main reason i get good frame rate with this setup. When people find their new computer with I7 doesn't run as well as an old computer with an I5, they might want to consider looking at the hard drive cache as well. I know their is a thread out there on how to setup a ram drive to run swtor - might be worth looking at. The Fusion Drive concept is nice... but it will have a short life... SSDs have grown in size and dropped in price to the point where many people can simply leave the hard drives behind... But either way... anyone who can afford an i7 should be booting from and running SWTOR from a SSD these days anyway, a 500GB SSD is down near $200 and makes the whole computer experience different. I do still have many hard drives, for storage of large amounts of data (mostly for work), but my work machine has 3 SSDs in it, 1 boot drive, 1 working drive, and 1 swap/temp drive, along with two large RAID arrays (I do software development) of hard drives. My home machines? 100% SSDs with the sole exception of the kid's computer, which has a 128GB SSD boot drive and a 2 TB hard drive for their Steam games. One of these days I'll get around to tossing that hard drive and replacing it with a SSD, but frankly, the kids are under 10, they'll live. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrumPotte Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 I agree, the SSD's are the future. I went with the fusion drive because it was a good compromise - about 60 to 80% of the performance increase of the SSD's without the SSD. It was a cheaper option and i still am not ready to make the jump to the SSD's yet - when they have a history for reliability i'll have more confidence. P.S. I'm a software developer also - although i'm trying to get out of it , been doing it for over 25 years and need a change...lol. The Fusion Drive concept is nice... but it will have a short life... SSDs have grown in size and dropped in price to the point where many people can simply leave the hard drives behind... But either way... anyone who can afford an i7 should be booting from and running SWTOR from a SSD these days anyway, a 500GB SSD is down near $200 and makes the whole computer experience different. I do still have many hard drives, for storage of large amounts of data (mostly for work), but my work machine has 3 SSDs in it, 1 boot drive, 1 working drive, and 1 swap/temp drive, along with two large RAID arrays (I do software development) of hard drives. My home machines? 100% SSDs with the sole exception of the kid's computer, which has a 128GB SSD boot drive and a 2 TB hard drive for their Steam games. One of these days I'll get around to tossing that hard drive and replacing it with a SSD, but frankly, the kids are under 10, they'll live. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elder- Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 No, go AMD its aimed at gaming Example: AMD 7850k (4 core), has a powerful card inside the chip. I7 and i5 are industry standard FOR ALMOST EVERYTHING EXCEPT GAMING. The clock doesnt matter anymore, Intel is more energy efficient but that it, for gaming the speed is almost solely on graphics card you use. Please for the love of all computer's don't listen to this guy, AMD is not made for gaming, and honestly most gaming is built for intel and nvidia. The game speed is based on cpu's and video card and ram and even hard drive. the i5 is fine for this game and basically any game out right now, the i7 is overkill and will just be future proofing. AMD is cheaper and theres a reason, they are slower. Games are not optimized for amd. Same for nvidia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xxPhoenixlordxx Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Nuff said Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anyakaschala Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 honestly, I don't think i5 or i7 will matter much in terms of SWTOR. Hyperthreading doesn't really help a whole lot. The other point being, in terms of a laptop, you usually get what you get in terms of the chip, with not a lot of wiggle room in terms of the build. Thus, IMO, if everything lines up stat wise, meaning hd size(s) if ssd and data drive, vid card, memory, etc.... go with the one that has the stats that fit you best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aries_cz Posted August 19, 2014 Share Posted August 19, 2014 i7 does not really provide that much of boost if your only concern is playing games. But, if you want to do something creative on the computer (rendering models or videos), the i7 is probably worth it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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