(12-01-2013, 02:54 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote:Of course the newer stuff will be better stock, but if you care about prices, or if you can overclock, 2nd generation according to Overclock.net is actually better since you can reach higher clock speeds given sufficient cooling.limith Wrote:For gaming there's a Toms Hardware report that says the 4th generation stuff is generally only 10% better than 2nd generation Intel after overclocking is taken into consideration due to the fact the 3rd/4th generations focus more on energy efficiency. If you don't care about electricity bills, just get a new motherboard (that's "future proof") and a used/old/ or even new top of the line i7 from the 2nd generation that can overclock and use all of your existing old computer parts. Power supply shouldn't cost you more than $50 if you need one (really only need minimum 400W for 1 graphics card, 600W for 2), you can get a great cooler for $40 to let you overclock your processor to 4.7+Ghz, and the processor/Mobo combination shouldn't be more than $450 (pretax) at most if you buy new because that's how much I spent on it when it came out, cheaper if you buy used.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Haswell ranges from 0% to 30% faster clock for clock than ivy bridge depending on the application. Averaging around 10%. But for dolphin it's very close to 30%. You should probably take a look at our wind waker benchmark: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-cpu-benchmark
http://www.overclock.net/t/1306928/2nd-gen-intel-i7-vs-3rd-gen-intel-i7#post_18177085
Tom's Hardware did a comparison and Stock 4th generation i7 in some cases is actually worse than stock 3rd generation.