i5 750 vs i7 920

[fattrav]

I need some advise. This will be my first computer build. I mainly use my computer for internet, iTunes, Microsoft Office, and will be using it for ff14(not that any clear specs are out yet). At this time I do not do any video streaming/downloading/editing, but see the slight possibility for some of that in the future, home movie type of stuff.

I have a Microcenter near my home, so I can buy the i5 for $150, or the i7 for $200. I am not a fan of spending money on things that will never get used, but am not afraid to pay for quality.

Besides the differences in price of the processor, there are some costs associated with the differences in motherboards as well as memory.

My build will be Win7, 4/6GB Ram with a HD5850.

My question is, will there be any GPU bottlenecking with an i5 build with a HD5850? And is it worth an extra $200-$400 for an i7 build vs an i5 build?

[kuronosan]

If you feel like hyperthreading is useful to you then the i7 is the way to go. Otherwise the i5 is pretty much the same thing.

[fattrav]

I know little about hyperthreading, I actually just read the wiki on it. Says about a 15%-30% performance boost. Again, I run Office, IE8, iTunes, and will be playing ff14, does hyperthreading apply to overall performance, or it is specifically tuned for specific programs?

Anyways, I go back to one of my previous questions, will the HD5850 be bottlenecked by the i5?

If there is an overall system performance boost of 15%-30%, I would chip in for the added cost of an i7 build.

[kuronosan]

Well, you see the performance boost the largest in a 64-bit system. Applications that use this would probably see the biggest gains (and possibly games too). It essentially makes the computer think there are 8 cores instead of 4.

As far as the GFX card being bottlenecked, I'm afraid I'm GPU-stupid when it comes to that question. Near as I can tell, there's no way the CPU you're looking at will bottleneck your GPU, but it still may be possible.

[fishstix]

It pretty much only bottlenecks if you're the type of gamer/user that maxes out the system. The i5 boards only allow for 8x PCI-e speeds when going into SLI/xfire and even then, I don't believe the difference between 8x and 16x is visually noticable, pretty much can only be seen by benchmarks imo.

For everything you do, even video editing, the i5 should be sufficient.