I was looking for a 2nd or 3rd Gen intel cpu(my current mob is H61) and found someone selling a i5 2400 asking for best offer, and someone else selling a i7 2600 for $90. My current cpu slows things down quite a bit and is always at least 50% used (takes 1 of my 2 cores) when windows update pop up. FYI this is for windows update prompt, it’s not even updating or downloading at all. Either would be a great upgrade from my current cpu (pentium g630) as I’m currently limited on money. I plan to get a new system in the future, but right now I can’t really afford to get a new one. I plan on holding from upgrading for least another 1.5-2 years as I gather money and figure out what kinda system to get in the future. So I was wondering which cpu should I go for? And if I go for the I5 how much do you it would be worth?
i5, $40~$50. If you don't know much about the CPUs I don't think you'll be doing anything CPU intensive, unless you are going to. Like what do you do? Just web browse? if so then the i5 is what you want.
I prefer you'll go save for later, i5 is already somewhat... old? A gen or two later, it's performance will never overcome later's minimum need of performance level. I would suggest buying the i7 one if possible, but haggle it a bit more, not on at $90, since it is a second hand already. If you have an irregular income/leisure money, just save it for new ones to come or when i10 goes on discount.
Go for the cheapest processor, so 2400? Which should be about 50 bucks, anything else you'll pay double for marginal improvements in performance. (Jump to 2400 will double your cpu performance, but 2400->2600 is only about 10-20% difference) Windows Update not downloading is normal. It's annoying yes. It does that sometimes regardless of what CPU you have.
A 2600 for $90 isn't that great of a deal. That's about average, if not a hair less expensive than average. If you'd rather go for the 2400, make a starting offer for $35-40, but don't go over $50. For $55-60, you can just buy one off Ebay. What matters is your intended use for your system. Are you going to be playing games or doing anything that takes advantage of Hyperthreading? If so, the i7 might make more sense. If you're just browsing the web and writing emails and Word documents, the i5 should suffice. For reference, the i7 2600 is about half the price of a brand new i5 8400 (~$180), which is better in just about every way. Of course, with the 8400, you'd need new RAM and a new mobo, but you can get 16 GB of RAM and a mobo for another $250. So, it'll cost around $430 to upgrade to a new CPU/mobo/RAM or you can spend $40-50 to see a modest bump in performance with an i5. Whether you decide to save your money or upgrade is ultimately determined by your usecase and by how long you're willing to tolerate your current situation while you save up for a new system.
Intentions? if you are just using it for reading, photo manipulation ,and light video editing, then the I5 should be perfect, if it includes gaming then the I7 and like @null said, up your ram
i think you got the i7 and i5s backwords i5 is a great gaming cpu as most games dont care about threads unless you are city skylines but for anything more multithreaded like video editing and photoshop a i7 is better
@op My advice for a new system is this. a mid teir i5 cpu can last for years unless you do heavy workloads and upgrade your gpu every 4ish years if you game because the high end gpus become low-medium end in 4 years. now if you live in the US and near a university(or other public-ish institution) go look up their surplus department. you can find computers for really cheep. http://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/browse/cataucs?catid=1
Really? granted I am out of practice, but if it comes to gaming, and streaming, plus a lot of the games I look up require a minimum of an I5 (is stuck with an I3)
While it's true that many games aren't thread-limited by a quad-core, there's still the issue of frequency. The i7 2600 has a 10% higher frequency than the i5 2400, which will help in games. Does that justify spending nearly twice as much on the i7, though, is the question.
ehhhh i3 i5 i7 is feature sets not a tier ranking. i3 has hyperthreading aka each physical core counts a 2 logical i5 has turboboost aka more speed for a core and other cores get knee capped i7 has both.
that was a more general comment about the i5 vs i7. after a while clock speeds tend to be a non factor in games as the bottleneck is else where like the gpu tends to be the biggest one. Edit: yes high teir i7s tend to be slightly faster than high teir i5s. Then again i7s can also be slower then i5s. i5s are recommended for gaming because they are fast enough with out features that make them costly.
In the case of the 2600 vs 2400, the 2600 has a 10% higher base clock and boost clock. It'll depend a bit on OP's GPU and usecase to determine which processor works best.
A 16Gb of DDR4 ram cost about ~200 right now(not including tax) besides the 2 outlier here and Z370 mobo cost at least $130(not including tax), probably sometime in the new year the budget boards will come out for a i5 8400. It looks like we are talking in 2 different currency as you used US while i'm talking in Canadian dollar as a there is no i5 8400 here under $200. I do some gaming, but mostly e sport titles as my current GPU is quite bad (550Ti) and coupled with the fact that my cpu at is a Intel Pentium G630(2 cores at 2.7ghz) there not much new games I can play with this setup. There are games I want to play but my current setup won't make the games enjoyable. I plan on getting a 1050TI or 1060 3gb within 6 months. Edit: my friend said he may let me borrow his gtx 960 when he upgrades to a 1070
If you're going to get a new system next year anyway, then just get the cheaper one. Boost memory to 4gb, and you're done.
Doesn't really matter in ths case. Two years isn't really that long. You can get the i7 if you want, but as other commenters pointed above, you might want to look for a better deal for that i7. 90 dollars for a 2nd gen i7 isn't expensive, but it isn't cheap either.