EatinOlives
Member
The i5 is better for price-to performance. Generally speaking you won't really get that much higher game performance by going with i7 as the quad core i5 processors are good enough. There may be a few situations in which the i7's extra processing threads could help in some gaming scenarios, but the differences usually aren't great enough to warrant spending the extra money. See these articles from Techspot and Anandtech for an idea of how small the differences are.
If you wanted higher performance, I'd recommend overclocking the i5 as opposed to paying more for the i7 unless you were doing things that would take more advantage of the i7's extra processing threads, like video editing or heavy computational stuff for school/work. Even then the i5 doesn't lag that far behind in video editing/encoding, according to those articles. A good cooler that costs less than the extra cost of going with the i7 would help with keeping temperatures down and let you overclock (now or in the future) for added performance.
Sounds great! I'll check those two articles out. It's been a long time since I've kept up with this stuff and I feel I need to get back into it.
Unfortunately I just realized I have a microATX-sized case, so if I get that bundle from Microcenter I'll need to spring for another case
