I might, and I emphasise "might" be in a position in a couple of weeks to buy a new box, courtesy of a recently deceased relative [God rest her soul].

Anyway I've been given the choice of two CPU's by local shop who built my last one for me. There's a price difference of £75 between the two, both have the same speed of 3.4 GHz.

Thoughts please? Is the £75 worth the difference I'd get or will the i5 do?

By all means for Vue, Poser, Maya get the i7. skimp on memory or now if you have to, or get a less exciting video card but get all the CPU you can afford now. The others are simple and inexpensive upgrades later. in fact the easiest way to save a few $ is skip a cddvd drive and scavange one from an older computer.

I've asked for 16 Gig DDR3 RAM, my current box has 8 so there's no point me going for the same or it will get outdated too quickly.

The card quoted is an Nvidia GTX 570

i7

for sheer horse power :)

i5 are cut downs, sort of

Yea, but is the extra worth £75 more my friend?

It might not sound a lot, but I'm out of work at the minute so it is to me..LOL.

I think the main difference is hyperthreading, so the i7 will show as having 8 cores and the i5 as having 4. If you have a version of Vue that supports 8 cores then you would see slightly better performance and if you don't then it's not worth getting the i7. You could also save on your graphics card unless you are a big gamer as it is way overpowered for Vue.

Slightly OT I have a Dell Studio XPS 8100 Core I7 CPU 860 @280 GHz 277GHz with 8GB of RAM, 64 Bit OS, 1GB DDR3 Nvidia 240GTS

Its a good machine and I have very few problems with it. But why does it only show as 4 cores instead of 8. I have Vue 9 Complete and an educational version of Vue 9 Infinite both only show up as 4 CPUs I have threaded optimization turned on in my NVIDIA control panel.

I had this explained to me by my computer shop. If the CPU supports hyperthreading it will show as 8 cores in the performance tab, if it only shows 4 then it's not hyperthreaded. That's what he said anyway.

My current CPU, a Quad core Q6600 only shows 4.

if you have infinite and Xstream it WILL use all 8 process streams, ie it WILL render faster, nto exaclty twice as fast if i recall, but a very significant amount anyway
Think COmplete can also use all cores available??

ok checked, Vue 8 and 9 complete cna only use 4 CPUs on 32 bit, but 8 on 64 bit, Infinite cna use unlimited number of CPUs

Threads on I7s count as a CPU so they have 8 CPUs

and hey I do understand bud on the money issues, I'm waiting on Cameron/Clegg, El Fascistos hehe*,* ending Welfare and that's me and mine well and truly ****ed
makes sound/gesture of knife across throat :/

Well that's what I thought, I have 64 bit os and 64 bit versions of the software installed but only showing 4 cpus. might visit e-on see if they can shed some light on it.

i7 all the way mate, don't question, just do it :) lol

All the best :)

Jon

I'm still undecided really what to do with the money, it's not much and I really need my bathroom replacing and my lounge decorating, so it might be a toss up between those two things and the new computer.

Decisions, decisions...LOL.

I am sure the new computer would bring you far more joy and its less effort too :)

Jon

LOL, yea, but I wouldn't be doing the work, I'm too old to do stuff like that now. I really want the new comp. but my head is telling me to do the other..

I'm not sure how much is coming yet, it might be enough for all 3, now that would be good.

Yeah, that would be the ideal solution mate, must say I would go the PC route myself, but thats just me lol. Deffo an i7 if you get a new PC sorted, think you will appreciate the extra power.

Jon

Yea, thanks for the tip on that, I'm thinking I can cut the cost down on other bits maybe, you know like transferring my HD's out of this one for the back up drives instead of buying them, and the same with the DVD writer and DVD drive. At a pich I could prolly use my existing Nvidia card too [9800GT]

I'd just rather have it all new rather than cobbled together.

Yeah I know what you mean mate, dvd writer and drive will be fine, and probably the hard drives as well, but if they aren't, I would get SATA drives, drives are next to nothing now in terms of price. Same as graphics cards really, you can get a card much more powerful than that one you have for around £50!

Whatever you decide, all the best with it :)

Jon

There is a more important factor than the hyperthreading hype: check how much cache the processor has: i7s (apart from the 970) have 8MB while i5 are either 4 or 8MBs depending on the model.

Try this link to CPU charts at tomshardware.com, the application tested is 3Max and is the overall speed of the rendering (smaller the better) for various CPU's (including I5 & I7).

Unfortunetly they stopped testing 3d apps lately so this one is a bit old but I figure render time is probably a factor in your purchase.

Note: I use an i7 920 which comes up as 8 threads on taskmanager and all are slamming on V9C no problems, just wish I had more ram;)

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/3DS-Max-2009,1380.html

I was under the impression that an i7 860 was only a 4 core processor or am I missing something? I don't understand how an i7 860 could be showing 8 cores when it only has 4? Maybe I need more schooling on these because in a few months I'll also be going from and intel core 2 quad to an i7 as well.

Its because of hyper-threading mate, it makes it look like it has 8 cores, of course it doesn't, it just has the 4.

If you want a better understanding, click the link below :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

HTH

Jon

In relation to my comment of 8 threeds, Jonj1611 is correct, the 4 cores displays as 8 threeds on taskmgr.exe due to hyperthreeding.

The important thing is that all of the threeds are active when I render which means that as close to 100% of the CPU's resources are being used when rendering.

Quote - Its because of hyper-threading mate, it makes it look like it has 8 cores, of course it doesn't, it just has the 4.

If you want a better understanding, click the link below :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

HTH

Jon

Got it mate thanks!

Intel is doing a recall on i5 and i7 chips for some reason.  Not sure what they found bad about them to spend all that money to start replacing.  Just heard about it a couple hours ago.

OK.  Something is wrong with the Sandy Bridge technology in the gen2 i5s and i7s.  Probably old news by now to most.

Attached Link: http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/chipset_design_flaw.php

Oh, Ok.  It's the chipsets they're talking about.