Quote:
Originally Posted by Dist
I disagree about i5-i7 being for hardcore gamers. Casual user can get use out of them too, if you appreciate speed. Though given the budget, I don't think he can go for those. To be honest, though I personally hate AMD, with his budget he would be better off going for AMD way. Perhaps buy Phenom X6 for example, those are quite cheap currently.
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What would be the benefit?
For the OP
-Web browsing - None. The average low end desktop CPU is far more than fast enough.
-Writing - None. Like web browsing. Word isn't a heavy application
-Playing video - Little right now. Arguably more future proofing, but video is generally well multithreaded which means that the Ph2X6 would be better than most of the i5's.
-Converting video - Faster. Depending on how time sensitive (encode and load onto iPod right before leaving for work vs encode only a few episodes over night) it might be worth it. Though, Ph2X6 is generally better bang for the buck at the lower end of i5/i7 due to multithreading.
Examples of where the i5/i7's really shine
-Heavy Excel spreadsheets. Like the really huge ones. If you don't think Excel can be that resource intensive, you haven't seen one of these bad boys yet.
-Compiling. Then again, the more time spent compiling is the more time spent larping.
-Very high end gaming. The CPU really just needs to keep up with the GPU for gaming, but when you have a quad xfire setup, a high end CPU is required to not be a bottleneck.
-Benchmarking. MOAR NUMBERZ!!! Yeah.