I5 or I7
 

I have been reading information on both the I5 and I7 and have seen recommendations for each in editing video. Is hyperthreading needed for Vegas? I presently use 8.0C on a 6600 quad. The I5 is definitely a cost savings versus the I7. I am moving into editing jobs with both HDV and AVCHD footage.

Would I be making the wrong decision going with the I5 because of price instead of the I7 because of additional features?

I have edited the thread, as I might have mis-directed it - My question might better be is if I should purchase a system using the 1156 socket or the 1366 socket.

Your question is diffucult to answer for several reasons, and you should research this question further on some review sites.

I have done some reading and I would have great difficulty deciding myself. 1366 is not dead, but it's days are numbered, but on the other hand there is a very nice chip on the horizon for 1366 chipset.

Yes hyperthreading is utilized by Vegas, but not necessary. I guess if I had to choose this minute I would go for an i7, but again, I'm not clear as to if it would be the best long-term decision.

...Cannibal Corpse?
 

Hey Chris,

I'm not answering your question, for that I do apologize, but your name is that of a famous (depending on how you look at it) vocalist for a band called Six Feet Under (ex-Cannibal Corpse)...coincidence?

Like Jeff, I've been reading and trying to figure out the same questions about upgrading, but I'm more stuck between deciding between the i7 920 (1366 motherboard) and the newer i7 860 (1156 motherboard).

I wouldn't get the i5 for sure. Okay for mainstream, but for the small difference in price, I would avoid it and get one of the i7s. You'll be happier with rendering.

If you are not interested in overclocking at all, I would suggest the i7 860 as a great choice.

As I understand it that "nice chip" for the 1366 platform may be an 8 core chip. Given that, why do you say the 1366 days are numbered? Will those chips work with current 1366 mobo's? Thanks - PK

Go with the i7 for sure.. If you're using this for production work (particularly with AVCHD) you'll need all the horsepower you can get.. If I were in your shoes I'd...

A) Buy the i7-920 and overclock it to 3.0Ghz
or
B) Buy the i7-860 and leave it alone

Jon

Hi Jon,
What would be the performance difference with stock i7-860 and the i7-920? Have you used both in an editing environment? I believe the new 860 is suppose to be equally easy to overclock. My concern would be if the dual channel memory would slow things down. Thanks - PK

860 v 920
 

Been looking at this too.
The reason the 1366 is being phased out is because triple ram got too much resistance from the market. The other consideration is the 920 sucks more watts than 820. Overall, the whole 920 system runs somewhat hotter, so cooling is more an issue (though managable).

The i7 860 video benchmarks compared to the 920 is largely a difference of a few seconds (920 slightly slower), but not anything you'd notice. I didn't see any point in looking at the i5, so can't comment on it. If I had to buy today, I'd do the 860, even though I currently have a 920.

However, since you have the 6600 quad, can you just drop in another CPU and retain the rest of the components? Off the top of my head, I think that's LGA775 socket and Would be a lot cheaper. Granted not as fast since it still retains the FSB, but may be woth looking into. If you do this, be sure to updatethe motherboard firmware to latest version before swapping the CPU's.

Yeah, you could also just stick with the Q6600 and spend $120 on Neoscene to edit AVCHD which will be FAR better than trying to throw horsepower at AVCHD on the Vegas timeline. :)

Jon

Where did you find benchmarks comparing the 860 to the 920?

I looked on Tom's Hardware, but they were comparing an 870 to the 920. The 870 is a $560 chip, versus the more comparably priced 860.

i7 920 desktops are down to $599 now.

Brian, where are these $599 i7 desktops to which you refer?

Dell refurbs. I've got one, sure looks new to me. It's got an e-sata port, firewire, and of course USB. The scratch and dents are even cheaper. One theory for the crazy pricing is they're clearing out the house for W7. I used a 15% off coupon so mine was actually $510. Not bad for an i7 quad. I really wanted a Mac, but $500 might get you a nice carrying case for a Macbook Pro.

Dell is actually one of two brands recommended by Videoguys. Dunno if they're deserving, I buy them because they're cheap.

As has been said, you can't OC Dells, but their return policy is fair, tech support adequate.

I agree. If you're making any sort of decent money with it, its not worth saving $80 just to find a particular app that utilizes hyper threading works slower because you got the i5. In my experience I find cutting corners on business related equipment isn't worth it. This doesn't mean you need to buy the top end just don't sweat the small stuff.

I purchased a Dell workstation refurb. It was a nice machine, but as in another thread re: the i7s, I had issues with Firewire and more. In the other i7 thread there were several complaints about e-sata ports not working correctly. Dell's tech support was quite good, and I was at one time a huge fan, but not so much anymore. Hopefully they have worked out the esata issues.

Right here:
AnandTech Bench (beta): Intel Core i7 860 vs Intel Core i7 920

Thanks James for the link. Looks like there pretty darn close, but the lower power consumption and heatt would definitely have to tip the scale in favor of the 860 :)

Heat and power is really not an issue with the 920 unless you overclock. What's up with the concern over power consumption, the electric bill? Nevertheless, it's the upgrade path that is, IMO much more important than these things.

I personally am not aware of what is coming, but the coming Gulftown processor sounds very nice from what little I've read about it.

Also keep in mind the 920 is much easier to overclock than the 860 with the simple addition of a good cpu fan. On the other hand, as Jon M said, if you're not an overclocker, the 860 would be a great choice.

Below is a link to the new 1156 MOBO from Asus that features USB 3.0, sounds interesting. Seems to be an amazing board...

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.

Good catch, Jeff. I'll add that to the list. I've been waiting for USB3 and SATA6 to arrive before upgrading to the i7 860.

Gigabyte has announced no less than 7 new boards with the same upgrades:

GIGABYTE 333 Onboard Acceleration

Can't wait!

Let's make it clear that there is no discernable difference in price or performance between the i7-860 and the i7-920. The differences are in the socket and what it entails:

1. P55 motherboards are less expensive than X58 motherboards.
2. P55 motherboards have no PCI-e slots free to use with raid controllers or other cards.
3. Overclock capabilities at stock voltages is very limited with the i7-860.
4. Support for QPI has been abolished with the i7-860.
5. P55 is limited to 16 PCI-e lanes, X58 has 36 lanes.
6. X58 is fully compatible with the new hex-core Gulftown, P55 is not.
7. P55 is limited to 4 memory slots, X58 has 6 memory slots.

Intel has a reason to brand the i7-860 as main stream and the i7-920 as high performance. IMO on an editing rig, limiting PCI-e expansion capabilities, limiting video options, limiting memory capabilities and limiting upgrade capabilities (Gulftown) are severe drawbacks, not easily offset by a lower electricity bill or a few degrees lower temperature.

Harm, the Asus board above has free 2 PCIe slots, unless I'm misunderstanding something in your post. Additionally, overclocking is certainly not as simple with the 1156, but not a dealbreaker, IMO.

The advantages of Sata 6 Gb/s and USB 3 for early adopters are also not to be overlooked. Number of memory slots that you mention is a bit of a downer, but DDR2 is cheaper anyway, is it not? So you buy 4 X 4GB sticks instead of 6 2x sticks, I don't see a huge disadvantage.

I run the 920, and while the Gulftown sounds great, my understanding is prices will begin at $1K plus. Not exactly something small-time operators like me will be waiting in line for. Sure prices will drop, but how long will it take for a $1k processor to drop to >$500 level?

Jeff,

The X58 has support for 36 PCI-e lanes, in any configuration, the P55 only 16 lanes all used by the embedded graphics chip.

Admitted there is support for PCI-e 1x slots on the P55, but that is useless for any serious card and certainly for a raid controller.

Harm, the Asus board has 2x PCIex16 Slots. If you're talking about the Gigabyte boards, I think I would lean towards the Asus anyway. At any rate I'm quite happy with my 1366. I would hope for early adopters that they would release a 1366 MOBO with the newer USB and SATA connectors, which would be the best of both worlds.

Dammit, Harm, just when I had decided on the 860, you get me thinking about the 920 again.

All the reviews I read suggest that there are no major real-world differences in performance between the two. Can you expand a bit on the disadvantages of the 1156 platform?

For example, perhaps I don't need a dedicated raid card if SATA6 has such better performance. And what do you mean about integrated graphics on a CPU? I can't find any relevant info on that.

There's so much contradictory info, it's hard to decide. Here's a summary I just checked out:

"core i7 920
Clock speed 2.66
QPI 4.8 GT/s
Triple Channel memory
Trubo boost, increases the clock speed by 133 mhz.
X16 PCI Express and 2X16 for sli or crossfire 4X8 for quad
Uncore speed, 2.13 (max is 1066 DDR3 Ram) However this can be overclocked easy.
Supports HyperThreading Techonolgy, 4 cores each with 2 thread's = 8

Core i7 860
Clock speed 2.8
DMI: i'll explain a little about this, now in the previus core i7's, they had Quick path (QPI) to get connected with the Northbridge that had the PCI controller on it, but on the new core i7 870, the PCI controller is on Die on the CPU it self, therefor there is no need for a northbridge connection, because everything goes direct to the cpu to reduce latency, thats a pro for core i7 860 not a con btw
Dual Channel memory
Trubo boost, increases the clock speed by about 600 mhz.
X16 PCI Express and 2X8 for sli or crossfire
Uncore speed, 2.40 (max is 1333 DDR3 Ram) However this can be overclocked easy.
Supports HyperThreading Techonolgy, 4 cores each with 2 thread's = 8

to make this more simple, i'll explain about the pros and cons.

Core i7 920 has better memory bandwidth than both core core i7 860 and core i5 750, however core i7 860 and core i5 750 have better clock speed because of the better turbo.

Now here is where it gets tricky. Because the core i7 860 has an on-die PCI Controller supporting X16, it will perform better when using a SINGLE GPU card, however if you want to sli then Core i7 920 will do better at sli because it supports 2X16 for sli while i7 860 2x8 for sli. In other words you will get more bandwidth if using sli on X58 motherboard, but will have better performance if doing single GPU on P55 motherboard because of the pci controller on the cpu.

so if you wanna get a system without sli or upgrading, then core i5 or core i7 860 is better and cheaper.

but if your looking forword to sli and upgrade in the future, then core i7 920 with x58 motherboard will be better for you."


So this guy is saying the QPI situation is actually BETTER for the 860.

It's tough, because most of the reviews and opinions are by and for gamers, which I am not. For example, I have no interest in sli. As for OpenCL, I don't work in Maya or AutoCAD. Does it make any difference for video editing?

Thanks as always.

Jeff,

Can you explain these architectural differences in relation to ASUS claim?

Nope, I don't understand it.

Vito, I will get back to your very valid questions, but first to the architecture of the P55 versus the X58.

The X58 has 36 PCI-e lanes, that can be configured as the mobo manufacturers want. So you have for instance one PCI-e 16x, two PCI-e 8x and a single PCI-e 4x slot or you can have 2 PCI-e 16x slots and a single PCI-e 4x slot, all amounting to 36 lanes.

Usually you will have one PCI-e slot for a video card at PCI-e 16x, leaving you with only 20 lanes for expansion. That is quite enough for a PCI-e 8x raid controller or other cards, even a second PCI-e 16x video card in SLI configuration and an additional PCI-e 4x raid controller.

The P55 has only 16 lanes. These can be used in a single slot or in a dual PCI-e 8x slot configuration. Now, if you want to have the same video capability as an X58, all your lanes are used. There may be additional physical slots on the mobo, but the chipset does not have any more lanes available, unless you downgrade the video card from 16x to 8x.

So here is the major drawback of the P55. And Vito, you are correct, I mistakenly mentioned integrated graphics, that is plain wrong (Westmere does that), but the bottom line is that if you want to use a 16x PCI-e card for video, all your lanes are used up and you have no more expansion capability, due to the ingetrated PCI-e bus. My bad.
Sorry.

The P55 does allow 2 video cards in SLI configuration, but only as dual PCI-e 8x cards, which means a performance penalty hit. It still does not allow a raid controller to be added, due to the lack of available lanes on the chip.

Harm, I installed and ran host raid controllers (Adaptec 1225 and 1430) on my LGA 775 board almost 2 years ago for over a year (and still run them on my current board). They are 4x (maybe less, I don't remember) I believe and transfer files at about 100 to 150 Mbps drive depending on the drive.

Why wouldn't they run on a board that is two years newer and fairly feature rich? I don't understand why 1366 boards cannot run raid controllers.

What am I missing here? I don't know much about computers, but this is especially confusing to me.

Jeff,

I use an Areca ARC-1680iX-12, which is a PCI-e 8x board with the IOP 348 chip and it gives me an average transfer rate of 853 MB/s.

These kind of boards can ONLY run on X58 boards, not on P55 boards due to the lack of PCI lanes.

OK, you have clarified. You had said Raid controllers wouldn't work, but you meant a specific speed of controllers, that's different. Wow yours is fast. My internal drives running raid don't run much faster than a peak of 200mbps...so you are transferring at around what, 50Gb per minute? That is very fast. I get maybe 10 Gbpm. What kind of drives do you use?

Jeff,

I use 12 Samsung 1 TB F1 drives in a raid30, giving me these results in the previous link:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/high-def...ter-build.html

I can't imagine that...I have only 13 or so TB of discs, but they are mostly for storage, I have 10 or so projects waiting in the wings, each about 120GB in size, and I have copies of each on separate hard drives. I am anal about downloading tapes immediately after a job.

I do run Raid 0 for my scratch drive, but with only two velociraptors the results are almost the same as running one (these run on the integrated controller).

Hey Harm,

I still don't get it. I understand your explanation, but I checked out the Areca website, and they don't seem to have any particular requirement for X58 boards. They just say the card is PCIe x8. Is the card you bought designed for those boards?

Sorry to ask again, but it looks like a great solution for raid, and it would be a shame to close the door on it with a 1156 board.

Thanks for your patience.

Vito,

Let me try to explain it another way. You have a nice PCI-e 16x video card, a nVidia GTX2xx or a Quadro on a P55 board. Great. No problem yet. Now you decide to add PCI-e raid controller and now you find you can't, because the nVidia card uses all PCI-e lanes that are available. Only theoretical solution is to manually limit the nVidia card to use only 8 lanes out of the 16 available, thereby 'crippling' the performance of your great video card.

X58 does not have that problem, because there you have 36 lanes available, so the same video card can run at 16 x, you can add a PCI-e 8x raid controller and still have 12 lanes available for other peripherals.

The Areca ARC-1680iX is not specifically designed for X58, it can and will run in any system that has a PCI-e 8x slot available. What I intended to say was that in the direct comparison of X58 versus P55, only X58 has the necessary lanes to run this card.

How come the 950 seems to get no love? It's guaranteed 3GHz, and usually OCable to 4.0GHz, FWIU. Seems to be worth an extra ~$200.

Thanks, Harm.

Okay, Harm, you might have swung me back over to a core i7 920 D0 stepping, with this board:

GA-X58A-UD7 former GA-EX58-EXTREME 2 pixelized

Hopefully it's out before New Years. I want to buy in 2009 for this year's taxes!

Thanks for all the comments and insight.

Vito,

That sure looks like a great mobo and ready for the WD or Seagate 2 TB SATA3 disks.

Benchmark results for the i7-860 are still severly lacking and I have to admit I do not know of any benchmark test specifically for Vegas (there is one for Adobe CS4, PPBM4 home page) but as far as it may be helpful, here are my results with the i7-920 overclocked, which does not give me any reason to doubt the choice of the i7-920:

Great benchmark results! I can't wait to upgrade. I've been working on a dinosaur long enough.

All the best.