You'll likely see a bigger advantage moving from the i5 to the i7 than moving from 2nd to 3rd gen. At least some of the applications you list should be able to make good use of the i7's HyperThreading technology. HT is no longer a joke like it was in the P4 days--some highly threaded workloads can see 50% more performance. You'd have to investigate your particular use cases to know for sure (a quick review suggests matlab's results with HT can be mixed), but beware that there is a lot of outdated and/or blatantly incorrect information out there.
I don't believe that PCIe 3.0 is material enough for most use cases to be a deciding factor, but unless you're hoping to overclock to 4.8GHz, there's no reason to pick the 2600k over the 3770k if they're roughly equal in price. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anthony Q. Martin Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2013 7:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [H] Core 2nd vs 3nd Gen It seems as if the only real benefit, of dubious value it seems, is PCI 3.0. If my applications are start number crunching (like in Matlab), video editing and encoding, what is the payoff of a 3rd gen over a 2nd gen Core processor, assuming one is using a discrete GPU and not the internal intel HD graphics. 3nd gen uses less power? (I think I read this is so which translates into them not overclocking as much, a reason to stick with a 2nd gen). Also, the i7-2600k is roughly the same price as the i7-3770k. Is there any REAL advantage now to PCI 3.0? How about 2 years from now? (I'm planning on 4 years on a processor, IF I get one). The other option is to just keep the i5-2500k I have now. I could always use this in a hackintosh build, though, so it's not going to waste either way. If I get the i7, I will probably just put OS X on a separate HD and swap the boot drives (I'm not convinced I want to bother with dual booting). I'm hoping to order something today so I can get this build over next week, when I'm off from work. Thanks.
