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i3/Hyperthread and i5/turboboost

justin4pack

justin4pack

Senior member
Trying to figure out what the difference is in the 2 types, does either or have a higher benefit in gaming? Thanks for any info. Forum posts i found didnt help.
 
Hyperthreading pretends it has double the cores, without actually doubling the cores. Windows will report your Core i3 as having 4 cores and you will (usually) get more performance than without it, but it isn't as good as having 4 real cores.

Turbo Boost bumps the MHz a bit more under ideal conditions.

Will you be overclocking? If so, your choice would be the Core i5-2500k. Do you live near a Micro Center? If so, same choice (plus $50 off combo with motherboard).

For gaming both are great, though some (but not all) games may already be taking advantage of quad cores.
 
Please tell us current monitor resolution/video card and upgrade plans, and games played.
For many games the I3 does very well, about equivalent to an AMD Phenom II X4 955/965. Overclocking the 955/965 makes it "better" in some games, depending.
I5s with 4 real cores outperform all AMD chips even at stock clocks, and are better for multitasking.
 
The easist way to explain hyper-threading is to say it is all about leftovers. By having a second pathway to enter the processor it allows the computer to run a second application with the leftover resources of the processor that arent being uses. On a multi-threaded application you might get 10% or a little bit more than you would from the application running normally.

Intel® Turbo Boost on the other hand will monitor the number of cores being used and the temperature of the processors can clock up the speed on the processor to reach a preset point. For a processor like the Intel Core™ i5-2500 Turbo Boost can clock up to reach up to 3.9GHz all without ever having to overclock the processor. So Turbo Boost can have more really world value for most applications.
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
The easist way to explain hyper-threading is to say it is all about leftovers. By having a second pathway to enter the processor it allows the computer to run a second application with the leftover resources of the processor that arent being uses. On a multi-threaded application you might get 10% or a little bit more than you would from the application running normally.
Click to expand...
For example, in LinX I get more "bananas" with just 4 cores. Apparently, in some cases HT can be counterproductive. I remember a similar issue with Pentium 4's where having HT on would actually lower overall performance. Food for thought?
 
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Magic Carpet said:
For example, in LinX I get more "bananas" with just 4 cores. Apparently, in some cases HT can be counterproductive. I remember a similar issue with Pentium 4's where having HT on would actually lower overall performance. Food for thought?
Click to expand...
For 99% of modern applications, leaving HT on will provide a 0% to 15% performance increase. There are rare occurrences where HT will be "counterproductive" and they are mostly with older applications.
 
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