Intel Core i3 vs i5 vs i7

[CEDaytonaRydr]

I've been mainly a Mac user since 2008 but I have an old desktop that I'm looking to upgrade from. I have a flight sim set up on it, and it's been working okay but its still running XP and its VERY slow!

I have military exchange privileges but I'm not so cheap that I would forego the better option for $50 in taxes.

The exchange has pretty good deals on some i3 boxes but I've seen good deals on i5 and i7 boxes from other places. I know that i7 is the "latest and greatest" but beyond that, is there any other reason why I should pay a bit more for an i7 vs a really good deal on an i3?

Thanks!!!

[Albs]

For i3 CPUs, the main difference is that they only have two cores, a smaller cache, do not support Turbo Boost and have overall lower thermal output than i5 and i7 CPUs.

If you have loads of multitasking to do, i5+ will be the better option.

[Fizz]

If your flight sim is still running xp, any processor you can get these days will be leagues above what you have.

Games/sims generally aren't processor intensive, they're GPU (Video card), ram and and some cases disk intensive. To put this into perspective, I was playing games on an E8400 (about 8 year old dual core processor), 8GB of DDR2 RAM, but newer graphics card (GTX 560 ti). I recently upgraded the box to an i5-6600k and 16GB of DDR4. Same video card. My games play exactly the same. I didn't expect any difference in video game performance and did the upgrade for other reasons... just spend your money in the right places.

There are now several generations of Core i processors, so there are i5s that may perform better than i7s, for example.

I have a 3 year old laptop with an I3. However, when I bought it I upgraded to 16GB of ram and and SSD. It's just as fast as day 1.

[lazyworm]

read this -- http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/...ed-cpu-lineup/

[CEDaytonaRydr]

read this -- http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/...ed-cpu-lineup/

Thanks man! This is awesome!!!