Do i5's ever go down in price?

[Sonikku]

About three years ago my computer died and I had to build a new one but I was on a shoe string budget and i5 quads were $200 so I limited myself to a $64 g630 sandy bridge dual core as most gamers at the time assured me the hyper threading wasn't a big deal for games. This is the motherboard I use.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157303

Also running 4gb of ram and a radeon 7770 video card on Windows 7 in 1920x1080. Mostly play WoW/SWTOR. The setup has been "ok" but it's beginning to show it's age and I've been wanting to trade up to a quad core for a while. (maybe another 4gb of ram too while I'm at it) I checked a year after building the rig but the i5's were still $200. At this point I haven't kept track of the industry or hardware or if my motherboard can even use the latest bridge of processor. So my question is, have these things gotten ANY cheaper??




Moved from PC Gaming

Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent

 

[ControlD]

To buy a new quad core i5? No, things have not gotten any cheaper. However, since your motherboard is now going on three years old I would think you could find a second hand i5 or i7 for a good price and make the upgrade that way.

 

[Sonikku]

I'm surprised quad cores haven't gotten any cheaper in three whole years... what is the going rate of uses ones these days? Would my motherboard work with an Ivy Bridge?

 

[ThinClient]

What does this have to do with PC Gaming?

 

[Denithor]

Here's your CPU support list:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H77M/?cat=CPU

Short answer, any Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge quad will work fine for you. You can get an i5 2400/2500 for ~$100 on eBay or Amazon these days. The i5 2500K is still overpriced (cheapest I see on eBay this afternoon is $160, retarded for a used chip this old).

I would suggest the cheapest quad you can find and then upgrade your GPU, which will actually have more impact on most games than your CPU.

 

[master_shake_]

i once bought an i5 3330 on sale for 150 dollars new.

that was a once in a lifetime thing i think.

doesn't micro center have extreme deals on i5's?

 

[poohbear]

$160 is cheap for a 2500k considering it performs the same as a $250 4690k.

OP, that 4gb is really holding u back. All games i play nowadays avg 5~7gb in Windows. 8gb should be the minimum.

 

[EightySix Four]

You seem to be missing that new i5's are faster, use less power, and have more features than the i5's that were available at the time you purchased your last process. i5's of that generation are cheaper but are no longer in production, so you would need to pick it up used.

The question is kind of like asking if an F-150 ever gets any cheaper, but comparing a 2012 model year to a 2015. Make sense?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

i5s don't go down a lot in price because Intel stops making the old ones. Though right now you can get an i5-4440 for $175 and an i5-4460 for $180, as these two never went back up much after Black Friday.

 

[Sonikku]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

You seem to be missing that new i5's are faster, use less power, and have more features than the i5's that were available at the time you purchased your last process. i5's of that generation are cheaper but are no longer in production, so you would need to pick it up used.

The question is kind of like asking if an F-150 ever gets any cheaper, but comparing a 2012 model year to a 2015. Make sense?

Well, sort of. Except I was hoping there would at least be lower clocked entry level Pentium quad cores of some kind in the $100 range by 2015. Considering a lot of games now won't even boot up unless you have a quad, $200 minimum seems like kind of a high entry level to start the market off at considering the days of the Athlon 64's and Core 2 Duo's. I guess we were just spoiled... I suppose I'll check out used prices though and if nothing else pick up another stick of ram.

 

[el etro]

Core i5(NHL/SNB/IVB/HSW) is the best processor ever IMO. If competition was tighter than it was nowdays, we should see this amazing processor priced better.

 

[sm625]

Go on the bay and search for SR00T. $120 is a fair price.

 

[ElFenix]

Core i5(NHL/SNB/IVB/HSW) is the best processor ever IMO. If competition was tighter than it was nowdays, we should see this amazing processor priced better.

processor prices were generally higher when AMD presented competition for intel.

prices have generally come down because intel's installed base is its own biggest competitor. due to successive reductions in power consumption (amongst other factors) we haven't had the big clock speed boosts we used to see. so that's not a source of performance increase anymore. it's also not much of a source of differentiation for typical desktop parts either. lets look at the late pentium 3 days - the top of the line one might have been 1 GHz and cost $1000. step down a bit to a 700 MHz version and save $500 but also get a chip that ran quite a bit slower in benchmarks. now? ~$200 gets you an i5 that is neck and neck with intel's fastest in pretty much anything that isn't video encoding (where the additional cores win out).

(most expensive individual processor i ever bought was a dual core opteron 165 - i'm sure some others were more expensive, but those were bundled into the price of a complete system).

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Thanks for the replies everyone.



Well, sort of. Except I was hoping there would at least be lower clocked entry level Pentium quad cores of some kind in the $100 range by 2015. Considering a lot of games now won't even boot up unless you have a quad, $200 minimum seems like kind of a high entry level to start the market off at considering the days of the Athlon 64's and Core 2 Duo's. I guess we were just spoiled... I suppose I'll check out used prices though and if nothing else pick up another stick of ram.

There are $105 Haswell i3s that are solid gaming CPUs.

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?...3-4150BOX&c=CJ

 

[soccerballtux]

nothing Intel ever goes down in price until it's too late.

This is one of the reasons the argument that "you're getting onto an older, dead platform" is silly because the "newer platforms", yes, are newer; but Intel has a consistent history of changing sockets every 2 processors gens. So basically, the CPUs that are available to install in the motherboard now, are what you'll be able to install in the future. It's a dead platform from the start.

This market segmentation lets them control the prices on the CPUs for your board, and keeps the ebay prices high, too, until people move on from that generation.


Contrast this with AMD, I have used my Thermalright Ultra-120 on the e2180 Core2Duo, then the e8400, then the Phenom 2 X3 720 -> X4 unlock; then the X4 965, and now on my FX-8310 because it's AM3+. If I'd wanted to, I could have kept my 965 and just used it on the AM3+ motherboard. Since it could fit into AM2+, AM3, and AM3+ motherboards, I had a larger selling market and got $85 on ebay

 

[Enigmoid]

Thanks for the replies everyone.



Well, sort of. Except I was hoping there would at least be lower clocked entry level Pentium quad cores of some kind in the $100 range by 2015. Considering a lot of games now won't even boot up unless you have a quad, $200 minimum seems like kind of a high entry level to start the market off at considering the days of the Athlon 64's and Core 2 Duo's. I guess we were just spoiled... I suppose I'll check out used prices though and if nothing else pick up another stick of ram.

Intel never decreases the pricing on a product class. Newer members of that class simply increase performance at the same price.

 

[jhu]

nothing Intel ever goes down in price until it's too late.

This is one of the reasons the argument that "you're getting onto an older, dead platform" is silly because the "newer platforms", yes, are newer; but Intel has a consistent history of changing sockets every 2 processors gens. So basically, the CPUs that are available to install in the motherboard now, are what you'll be able to install in the future. It's a dead platform from the start.

This market segmentation lets them control the prices on the CPUs for your board, and keeps the ebay prices high, too, until people move on from that generation.


Contrast this with AMD, I have used my Thermalright Ultra-120 on the e2180 Core2Duo, then the e8400, then the Phenom 2 X3 720 -> X4 unlock; then the X4 965, and now on my FX-8310 because it's AM3+. If I'd wanted to, I could have kept my 965 and just used it on the AM3+ motherboard. Since it could fit into AM2+, AM3, and AM3+ motherboards, I had a larger selling market and got $85 on ebay

Man, you'd think $200 is breaking the bank or something. My dad bought an IBM XT back in the day, and that was already $5000 (~$10000 in 2014). Next up was the $1000 486 DX2/66: way faster and way cheaper than that XT.

People may complain that nominal price drops "don't happen", which while this might be true, also need to take inflation into account. Intel's highest end processors were and are still about $999 for at least the last 10 years. That POS Pentium 4 Emergency Edition costs ~$1200 in 2014 dollars. A 5960X costs less than that with signifcantly greater performance.

 

[Ken g6]

Short answer, any Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge quad will work fine for you. You can get an i5 2400/2500 for ~$100 on eBay or Amazon these days.

I agree with this. Locking most of their chips' multipliers isn't the nicest thing I've seen Intel do. But one nice side effect of it is that (I think) used locked chips are more likely to work well, since they've never been overclocked. (Or not much in the Sandy/Ivy i5/i7 case.)

Except I was hoping there would at least be lower clocked entry level Pentium quad cores of some kind in the $100 range by 2015.

Heh. There are. But they wouldn't work in your current mobo and I wouldn't game with them. (They're Atom-based. :twisted

 

[soccerballtux]

Man, you'd think $200 is breaking the bank or something. My dad bought an IBM XT back in the day, and that was already $5000 (~$10000 in 2014). Next up was the $1000 486 DX2/66: way faster and way cheaper than that XT.

People may complain that nominal price drops "don't happen", which while this might be true, also need to take inflation into account. Intel's highest end processors were and are still about $999 for at least the last 10 years. That POS Pentium 4 Emergency Edition costs ~$1200 in 2014 dollars. A 5960X costs less than that with signifcantly greater performance.

but they don't.

the q9550 I wanted was $300 to start, and $300 2 years after when I wanted it.

 

[escrow4]

nothing Intel ever goes down in price until it's too late.

This is one of the reasons the argument that "you're getting onto an older, dead platform" is silly because the "newer platforms", yes, are newer; but Intel has a consistent history of changing sockets every 2 processors gens. So basically, the CPUs that are available to install in the motherboard now, are what you'll be able to install in the future. It's a dead platform from the start.

This market segmentation lets them control the prices on the CPUs for your board, and keeps the ebay prices high, too, until people move on from that generation.


Contrast this with AMD, I have used my Thermalright Ultra-120 on the e2180 Core2Duo, then the e8400, then the Phenom 2 X3 720 -> X4 unlock; then the X4 965, and now on my FX-8310 because it's AM3+. If I'd wanted to, I could have kept my 965 and just used it on the AM3+ motherboard. Since it could fit into AM2+, AM3, and AM3+ motherboards, I had a larger selling market and got $85 on ebay

Dead socket sure but better than re-using AM3+ - a 2009 era tweaked socket into 2015. OP, Intel's only competition is itself. It has no reason to lower prices.

 

[Burpo]

Go on the bay and search for SR00T. $120 is a fair price.

^^^^^^ This..

 

[soccerballtux]

Dead socket sure but better than re-using AM3+ - a 2009 era tweaked socket into 2015. OP, Intel's only competition is itself. It has no reason to lower prices.

This is a lie. there's was absolutely no competition with AMD at my pricepoint. Not to mention I got to keep my $45 cooler and didn't have to buy a new one or even a mounting bracket.

 

[SPBHM]

you can buy used CPUs, at least for me it saved a lot of money, and I never had a CPU fail on me, CPU is one of the only things I don't see any difference in being used or new (apart from bad OC CPUs, but most i5s are locked anyway)

 

[Yuriman]

Haswell i3's are generally on-par with Sandy Bridge (locked) i5's, and can be found for $100-120.

 

[SPBHM]

Haswell i3's are generally on-par with Sandy Bridge (locked) i5's, and can be found for $100-120.

different performance characteristics...

(ignore pov ray, the result is wrong for it)
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/363?vs=1192

I think the old i5 is better balanced for newer games; but for WoW and SWTOR the Haswell i3 might win, still on swtor I compared an i5 and i3 at the same clock (both SB), and even with the game only showing 50% CPU usage the i5 had an advantage, so they might performance the same anyway.