I haven't read the whole article yet, but in my own experience the Intel Core i5 is good enough for day to day usage. The Core i7 is probably only useful when playing high-end video games and when you're doing audio/video editing and graphics design.
My preference would be an i7 with gobs of RAM to conduct parallel programming research/experiments due to my experience in that area. -- Tom
Running Intel Core Duo E6550 @233 Ghz - plenty of computing power for day to day applications. New Intel processors are good if you need to do something very demanding, like high intensity graphics or video editing work. Most people will be happy with a dual core processor. Quad core is overkill.
I agree. I find that Core 2 Duo processors are more than fast enough unless you need to anything demanding like the examples you gave or gaming (then of course you need a decent GPU as well). Until very recently my main laptop had a Core 2 Duo processor. I upgraded to one with a 1st generation i3, which is not that much more powerful, as I was able to buy it very cheaply - $100 AU, which is about $75 US. While it is nice to have a faster system now, I was happy with the performance of the Core 2 Duo laptop.
My i7 quad core 8 thread processor helps out alot because i run about 20 extensions. When i launch chrome from a dead stop with 20 extensions, all threads gets maxed out to bring me to my home page real fast.
Any processor post Core 2 Duo has the Intel Management Engine- this is a complete black box that at least has the capability to automagically backdoor yo' *****. Actually the Core 2 Duo does as well but at least it can be disabled/removed. AMD has an equally odious equivalent. I think an equally important consideration when buying a PC or motherboard is to find out whether it supports Intel AMT and whether you can disable it (at least ostensibly) or not. My computer has an option in UEFI/BIOS to permanently disable AMT (where presumably the code is deleted, though we dont know); even then, theres no hope to disable Intel ME since its required for the CPU to function... Since we're on a security forum I figured I should ruin your day with that unfortunate information
One CPU which should be considered on Price/Real World Performance grounds is the Intel Xeon. Almost all motherboards will support it and that ECC ram being needed (a popular misconception) isn't true.
No Xeon has an integrated GPU so in order to use one, you need an integrated gpu to go with it. Not necessarily a problem if you were going to get one anyways, though.
The Xeon E3 series can be had with integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics P530). The number designation would be with a "5" for those having grahics (like e3-1270 vs E3-1275).
Ah, TIL. The Xeons are supposed to be binned higher too so they might be able to hit higher overclocks.
The Xeons don't overclock. They do tend to run cooler and the Price/Performance ratio is quite good, but admittedly they aren't the best for gamers.
You can't multiplier overclock them but you can bclk overclock them. Would work especially well with Skylake Xeons.
A lot of gamers buy the i5 as it is claimed the hyperthreading on the i7 causes stuttering. I have not noticed it myself though.
