Present for mum, i5 750 or i7 860 ? Urgent.

[V3]

I've been trying to decide which one to get all week and I am running out of time.

Spec will be something like this

i5 750 or i7 860 ( about $100 difference)
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R
ATI 5770
2 x 2GB DDR3 1333 Kingston
3 x 1 TB Hdd ( If I go with i7, it'll be one less hdd)
Either DVD or Bluray drive or optical-less.
Coolermaster Ceturion 5
Coolermaster 460W PSU
Win 7 64 bit Home
Monitor I probably go with 24" TN panel, looking at Benq 24" at the moment. She doesn't want one that's too big or fancy.

Usage web browsing heavy Flash and Silverlight sites, like Clothing, shoes, etc. And I mean really heavy, it brings Core 2 Duo to it's knee with dozens of tab open. Looking at high res PDF (magazines and stuffs). This two are the reasons I am upgrading her PC, it looks frustrating last time I was there.

Other usage is watching videos (some are HDs) and going through high res family photos.

I know the 5770 will take care of the video, but what about Flash, Silverlight and PDF is there advantage to i7 860 over i5. I've been browsing the net and looked at benchies and stuffs and i7 doesn't give any performance improvement under the typical use. And it seems to be only an improvement when doing heavy mult-tasking job like encoding or 3D rendering in the background which my mum will do none of. The most probably listening to music in the background with some frequency upsampling plug-ins which can be CPU intensive but that's a far cry from encoding or rendering.

I am going to get the system like today, need to do it in a few hours actually. Please help me decide. Thank you.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Get her the i5, it's not gonna be a gamer...should be more than enough for a long time.

Sweet gift, your mom is gonna love it.

 

[Florin]

The i5 is a great chip, but for the price difference the 860 really hits the sweet spot. Certainly not necessary right now for non-enthusiasts. But it's got longer legs.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I having a hard time imagining a useage scenario where your Mother would need an i7 860 over an i5 750. Especially with GPU assisted browsing on the horizon.

Any flash or other wayward webcontent that brings a 750 to it's knees isn't going to be all that much faster on an 860.

Added to that a bit lower power consumption for a 750. Lack of hyperthreading shouldn't hurt either, unless you envisage your mother doing heavy multitasking. I myself have turned off hyperthreading on my 860...

Regards,
SB

 

[V3]

Thanks guys. Yes I've been reading some more, and I think I am going with i5. My feeling is like Silent_Buddha, if it is too slow on i5, it'll be slow too on the 860 too.

That GPU assisted browsing looks promising but so was GPU assited video encoding and I was so dissapointed with that but at least the GPU will assist in HD video and it'll run cooler than 4850, so I think I am happy with 5770 since she is no gamer.

I'll hold on to the extra $100 and see how it'll perform, if not well, I'll get her better cooling solution and OC the i5. Well I am gonna place the order now. Thanks again. Will update when everything is done.

 

[Moloch]

Why does your mom need an i5/i7? I find it hard to believe her usage brings a C2D to it's knees, might want ot find a better (faster) browser.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Why does your mom need an i5/i7? I find it hard to believe her usage brings a C2D to it's knees, might want ot find a better (faster) browser.

Maybe she likes collecting viruses, trojans, and worms. Or loves to have lots of toolbars in her browser?

Perhaps deathmatch sudoku against a super AI?

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

instead of the faster chip go with 8 gigs of ram. Would make a much bigger diffrence.


Also if she doesn't need 3 TB of space perhaps go with an ssd for general every day speed increases.

 

[V3]

I ordered it it'll be a week or two until they have all the components, cost around $1200 with tax so not too bad. I still have $300 for things.

Why does your mom need an i5/i7? I find it hard to believe her usage brings a C2D to it's knees, might want ot find a better (faster) browser.

I couldn't believe it either when she told me the PC was too slow until I saw it for myself. Really all these Flash, Silverlight and all this dynamic webpages has ruined web browsing experience. I go with i5 since it is the obvious step up from C2D, really. I would consider AMD but my friend that I got my components from is not really stock up with AMD so he couldn't get me the best price on them.

Anyway a good browser recommendation is welcome. She uses Firefox or IE, since that's the only two I installed for her. She likes to alternate between them. I hear Opera is fast but haven't try it myself.

Maybe she likes collecting viruses, trojans, and worms. Or loves to have lots of toolbars in her browser?

Perhaps deathmatch sudoku against a super AI?

That was the first thing that comes to my mind, but after scans didn't find anything, everything clean, I checked registers and boot sector and everything is alright. I was especially worry about them because she does banking and shopping on it, so I checked on the PC when I get my chance.

She played Chess, Go and Mahjong on the PC but yeah not much of a gamer. I tried to get her into Sudoku but she doesn't really like it. I also tried to get her to play a network game of Age of Empire 2 long ago when I was a kid, good times.

 

[V3]

instead of the faster chip go with 8 gigs of ram. Would make a much bigger diffrence.

Also if she doesn't need 3 TB of space perhaps go with an ssd for general every day speed increases.

Yeah, good point on the RAM. I got her the 64 bit Win 7 afterall. Her previous rig only got 2 GB. Though I thought 2 GB was plenty. But yeah Firefox is a memory hog. But still Windows was using around 1.4 GB when I checked, but maybe Firefox ran out of it's max allocation. Didn't really investigate.

She needs the space since I recently digitised all the family albums @1200dpi and videos as well as her CDs collection. I did built a PC for storage for them but its older and now it's full. Since hdd is cheap now, I thought it's not too bad to get a few, plus she likes taking pictures. So she'll fill those up in no time.

The problem wasn't Hdd trashing, but CPU usage spiked up. If it was hdd trashing I would consider SSD. Though I am not really sold on SSD yet. Maybe when they are larger and more affordable.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

4 Gigs of RAM should be fine unless she prefers to do In Private browsing (nothing saved, or cached to HD even cookies) for additional security. If she does prefer In Private browsing and likes to keep a lot of windows open (30+), she may need more. I suppose 8 gigs would "future proof" things a bit more though...

Then again RAM is still fairly cheap...

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

Yeah, good point on the RAM. I got her the 64 bit Win 7 afterall. Her previous rig only got 2 GB. Though I thought 2 GB was plenty. But yeah Firefox is a memory hog. But still Windows was using around 1.4 GB when I checked, but maybe Firefox ran out of it's max allocation. Didn't really investigate.

She needs the space since I recently digitised all the family albums @1200dpi and videos as well as her CDs collection. I did built a PC for storage for them but its older and now it's full. Since hdd is cheap now, I thought it's not too bad to get a few, plus she likes taking pictures. So she'll fill those up in no time.

The problem wasn't Hdd trashing, but CPU usage spiked up. If it was hdd trashing I would consider SSD. Though I am not really sold on SSD yet. Maybe when they are larger and more affordable.

a 60 gig is enough for windows and most likely all her applications. It will make the computer many more times responsive than any cpu or ram upgrade would.

I know hardrives are cheap with 1TB drives costing around $80. and a 60 gig ssd will cost you $200-250. But the ssd is the fastest upgrade I have done to my pc in years.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

a 60 gig is enough for windows and most likely all her applications. It will make the computer many more times responsive than any cpu or ram upgrade would.

I know hardrives are cheap with 1TB drives costing around $80. and a 60 gig ssd will cost you $200-250. But the ssd is the fastest upgrade I have done to my pc in years.

Hell, I'd go for a 500 gig HD before a 60 gig SSD if that's going to be the only drive. Heh, pretty much any of my relatives would kill me and make fun of me for the next 20 years if I so much as thought of giving them an SSD over a much more practical, far cheaper, and barely slower HDD.

Regards,
SB

 

[V3]

Thanks again. Yes she keeps lots of Windows open like several firefox windows with dozens of tabs each and don't really close them either. It's like News will be one Firefox, each tabs will be different news site. Another will be banking, another shopping, etc. Sometimes IE windows will be open along them too and an image viewer, MS Word and Excel and music players (which I configured to load the whole FLAC CD image to memory).

Will see how 4 GB goes. I tried opening Firefox in several windows and dozens of tabs each, I don't seem to go over 3 GB. I noticed Firefox did become laggy after I open it for several days It's like changing tabs or scrolling webpages can make my PC hang a little bit and spike up the CPU usage but then again my Firefox is old, my mum is on the newest one.

As for SSD, we will see. I can do an OS drive, If the rig really need it, but the rig is 24/7 and she hardly closed her applications. So all stuffs that would give SSD advantages should be in RAM, where it'll be the fastest.

 

[eastmen]

Hell, I'd go for a 500 gig HD before a 60 gig SSD if that's going to be the only drive. Heh, pretty much any of my relatives would kill me and make fun of me for the next 20 years if I so much as thought of giving them an SSD over a much more practical, far cheaper, and barely slower HDD.

Regards,
SB

Sigh lets keep the mary jane smoking to hte other threads about ssds . I can only tell you what I know by physicly using my ssd drives.

 

[Davros]

that seems like a fair statement eastman, for many people 60gb isnt enough

 

[eastmen]

that seems like a fair statement eastman, for many people 60gb isnt enough

Depends on what your using it for.

60 gigs is more than enough for a boot drive with the most used applications. Take 10 gigs for needing the room for optimal speed. Then another 10 gigs for windows 7. You still have 40 gigs of space and that can house alot of programs.

of course if your video editing or something it wont fit your stuff. Of course thats why you install the editing program to the ssd and then use a 1tb drive for the data storage.

I'm not sugesting not having a second drive in the pc. That be just silly.

I have a 60 gig ssd , a 640 gig wd from 2 or 3 years ago and then 1TB wd external drive and a 500 gig external drive.

 

[Davros]

according to ms win7 x64 takes up 20gb ive also heard people say it takes up 34gb ?

 

[bystander]

according to ms win7 x64 takes up 20gb ive also heard people say it takes up 34gb ?

I've had Win7 x64 for a few months now and it's currently at 23GB. It's grown by about 2GB since first install but I don't seeing it growing that much more. I'll be in trouble if it grows to 34GB as it's only on a 30GB SSD...

I don't see that happening though as I've used folder redirection since the beginning to put all my user files on a different drive, installed apps to a separate drive as well, so very little goes on the SSD.

 

[Blazkowicz]

she doesn't need a gaming card, give her a geforce 210

lately I've noticed 2TB hitachi drives coming on the same GB/$ term as smaller disks, you may have one 2TB internal + one external for backup.


I have trouble understanding about the ram usage. granted I'm on XP but with heavy browsing I'm only slightly above 1GB, and that's with a useless 400MB ramdisk I created to host firefox's cache (90% empty)
You may do that ramdrive trick (using ramdisk software + creating a key in about:config), it's psychological for me but will be more useful for mom


have in mind vista/7 will report ram usage including cache, like linux distros and unlike XP.

your issue is firefox being a CPU whore. it often happens to me, and I block flash.
lots of bad javascripts, make firefox go at 100% core usage and make it totally unresponsive for many seconds. using the adobe pdf plugin doesn't help : you can disable the plugin and have pdf open externally.

the solution to your problem isn't hardware (except better single-thread performance translating in a less long blocking CPU spike).
firefox 3.6, or 4.0 will/may be helpful.
Have a try at Chromium for an allegedly fast and multithreaded browser.

Using the flashblock extension, may look crude but is highly effective. maybe it's the issue more than javascript/rendering. I had accidental opening of 15 flash animation bring down a single core linux box with so much slowness that it was still even in a text console.

(lastly perhaps storing/downsampling your photos at 600dpi is more reasonable, it's 4x less pixels and seems big enough, but that's up to you )