AMD or Intel CPU?

[AnyOldName3]

The Sandy Bridge Es got the generation prefix from Ivy, and Ivy gets its from Haswell. It's just Intel's way of saying it's better than other chips of the same microarchitecture.

In certain thread-heavy applications (such as protein folding simulation, rendering and video transcoding) the extreme-series chips with the last microarchitecture will beat the standard and K series chips of the current microarchitecture, even though in anything not using all the cores and all the hyperthreads is likely to run slower. These chips are designed for people who have non-standard work to do, or want to say they have the most expensive chip available, and at least the latter of these groups wouldn't want to buy a new $1000 CPU when there were already others with higher model numbers before it was released.

[Amario130]

@AnyOldName3 I see you got the 4670K "for now". Are you saying there's a CPU out there that you wanted and couldn't afford or simply because there might be one that hasn't been tested on Dolphin or future possibilities? (going with third option). However, I'll probably won't do much video rendering which I clearly did not say in my last post but mostly gaming so I guess the 4670K will do for me. Since it has dual channeling my best bet would be 2x Gb sticks of ram.

Anybody fell free to throw in some randomly interesting offers. (That are good!)

[AnyOldName3]

It's the 3.4 GHz that's for now. I haven't got round to overclocking it to ~4.2 GHz yet. The actual chip itself is staying.

[Amario130]

@AnyOldName3 Gotcha.

The main difference between the i7 and the i5 is hyperthreading. Does hyperthreading heavily decrease Dolphin performance?

[Shonumi]

Not at all. It does allow for more background tasks to run when playing Dolphin, but it won't significantly improve Dolphin's performance.

[Amario130]

I've heard that people live streaming with high resolution on a i5 will bottleneck the cpu and that the i7 significantly increased their Fps. If this is the case then I'd rather go with the i7 instead. Besides it's only a bit slower than the i5 on the Dolphin Benchmarks without live streaming I would assume.

[NaturalViolence]

Hyperthreading does speed up video encoding in general, including live streaming.

And like AON3 said the 4820K is an overall faster and better chip than the 4770K. That's why its model number and price are higher. But it's slower in per core performance which happens to be the one thing that dolphin actually needs.