Guild Wars 2

I’m configuring a new Falcon Talon desktop. I planned on choosing their Intel® Core™ i5 3470 3.2GHz because it kept the cost below $2000 but a friend of mine is lobbying me to go for the i7.
While I’m sure GW2 will work great with a Intel® Core™ i5 3470 3.2GHz, I worry that future games won’t be handled as well.

Anyone have an opinion?

you will be better off with an i5 3570k and overclock it. and for that money, an i7 isn’t a bad choice. are you only building the computer or do you need monitors, keyboard, mouse and stuff?

The computer will come to around 2500 with an i7 and the monitor, keyboard included.
With an i5 and a monitor and keyboard it comes out to around 1800.

what i7 are you planning to get? the i7 3770k is abt $300

I personally have an i7 3770k and it can eat anything I throw at it, it will handle any program with ease.

I havent noticed any performance difference between 3570k and 3770k with exact same amount of overclock. I dont think you need to spend 2500 whatever your currency is. for i5 get 3570k instead you will be just fine.

Wait till June. Intel has new CPU’s coming out (Haswell), they will be replacing the CPU’s ur looking and will be using a different socket, meaning u wont be able to simply upgrade to them using the same motherboard u would have if u bought the PC ur configuring.

The main difference between the i5 and the i7 is hyperthreading. Most games don’t use more than 4 theads so the i7 won’t really provide you with any advantage in gaming vs the i5. I would go with i5 and save some money. i7 is really meant for things like video editing etc. Plus the i7 runs a bit hotter than the i5 so heat could be an issue, meaning you might have to spend more money on adequate cooling to compensate.

The i7 does have a touch more L3 memory cache but that’s because by having the ability to run 8 threads simultaneously rather than four means each thread has less cache which leads to main memory access which affects performance in a negative way. Since HT is all about improving the utilization of the internals of each core by giving the instruction scheduler a greater pool of non dependent instructions to rearrange and assign, the last thing it needs is a cache stall because that will just wipeout any gain made.

So the i5 line can have up to four threads sharing 6MB while the quad i7 can have up to eight threads sharing 8MB. So it depends on how much other stuff you are running at the same time as to whether an i5 or i7 is better, if that $100 premium is worth it.