Hey guys My pc recently died and I wanted build a new one. I've research on some of the parts but can't really choose. For the cpu I'm deciding on either i5 or i7 and is there a significant difference between them? I'll be mainly using my computer for gaming and would like it to handle most of the games without any difficulty and I'll also be using it for burning movies. I also want the price to be between my range and it can go over by like 100 or 200 if I can get a great increase in performance.
i5 is basically a Lynnfield i7 with hyper threading disabled so its up to you if you really need hyper threading. If you decide on an i7 processor keep in mind that there are two completely different versions so you will have to choose the one that works best for you.
In raw performance, the i7-860 > i7-920, though the 920 is superior in memory bandwidth intensive apps, such as video encoding. Also note that the P55 chipset only allows x8 x8 lanes for multi GPUs, which means if you think your getting really high end GPUs in the future, you may need to go with the 920, which means an X58 board.
