i3 or i5?

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madmardle

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Ken
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I've already asked the question re. which operating system, ie. 7, 8.1 or 10, but now I am a little confused about the processing power, I don't even know what my old XP PC has regarding the processor, but I know it only has 2GB of RAM as I updated it to that myself, ( it was previously only 256MB) I know that has nothing to do with the processor but I mention it only to say how basic it is. I only have Adobe Elements 7 which has everything I need for my very basic editing requirements and my PC does what I need albeit very slowly, My question now is, do I really neede i5, or would i3 be more than adequate for my needs.
I saw today in the Argos sale a couple of i3 Zoostorm for around £300, and i5 models for around £380, all running Windows 7, I have the larger amount, but am I wasting £80 on the i5 model? considering my old PC copes, although as I say very slowly, in fact it is only the fact that XP is no longer supported that made me think about changing (plus the fact I sold a Nikon Maco lens)
Any replies would be welcome, ( basic, non-technical answers would be preferrable because as you have deduced I am not too computer literate)
 
You should always go for the highest processor speed as you can, it will soon be outdated.
But having said that, I don't really know if it is worth getting an i7 setup unless you are into gaming.
I'm happy enough with an i3 for day to day stuff.
 
i5 for desktop every time. i3 has 2 cores with hyperthreading, i5 has 4 cores.

The i5 will do things quicker. The amount by much will depend on the program, but I'd always go for an i5 over an i3 unless you were buying an i3 for something special (e.g. low power usage as HTPC).
 
I don't understand it much but I have an i5 k which I've been told I can clock up. Mines a quad as well, I've seen you can get dual core i5s so watch out for that. I play a lot of games and spend a lot of time on PSE9 and I wish I'd got the i7 because the prossesor is the most expensive thing to upgrade between that the GPU and the ram, the later two I've already done.
 
Thanks everybody, looks like i5 is the way to go then, happy new year to you all.
Ken
 
Raptor Mike said:
Mines a quad as well, I've seen you can get dual core i5s so watch out for that.
Click to expand...
Yes, Intel used to be quite good on naming, but introduced the i5-4570T and -4570TE which are dual core low power devices 18 months back. They tend to be used in low power apps and, I suspect are just die with one or two broken cores on whilst everything else works.

Raptor Mike said:
I play a lot of games and spend a lot of time on PSE9 and I wish I'd got the i7 because the prossesor is the most expensive thing to upgrade between that the GPU and the ram, the later two I've already done.
Click to expand...
Whilst I have i7's here (one overclocked to 4.7GHz), I suspect you would find little real-world performance difference between a similar i5 and i7. When I did the benchmarking on my i7 (running the same CPU intensive app with hyperthreading on and off) I got a 15% speedup moving to the i7 config. This was with an H.264 recode which takes an hour at 100% CPU and uses cores very efficiently. I'd expect far less than that (a few % if that) in real world apps.

The other thing about i5's is they have a turbo mode where if you are only using 1 CPU, the chip speeds up - often by up to 1GHz. Unless you know you want an i3 (I have one in my HTPC where I know what the CPU bounds are and I'm interested in low power) then the i5 is the smart choice.
 
Thanks Andy,
I don't understand most of that,( lol,) but the main thing is you are recommending i5, which seems to be the main consensus of opinion and exactly what I was looking for.
Cheers & happy new year,
Ken,
 
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