God Emperor Akhenaton
It's always good to question everything because every human on this planet is a liar. And since Anandtech is a .com website, then at the very least we know it is a for-profit business. It is always a safe bet to have as little trust as possible, especially with business because in order to make money, it must be taken from somebody else. That is inherently a very unstable partnership.
Anandtech makes money through advertising. Readers coming to their site load ads in their browser; they're paid based on that alone. So Anandtech isn't funded by product manufacturers, they're funded by their readers. If they aren't getting visitors then they aren't making any advertising revenue. It is therefore in Anandtech's best interest to draw people to their site. They do this by publishing great reviews and technical articles and simple benchmark comparisons with tools like Bench. Them just saying "everything is amazing!" isn't going to draw in readers. Readers want honest, thoughtful, and well written reviews. In my opinion, Anandtech delivers quite well in that department.
There's nothing wrong with playing devil's advocate. Skepticism is fine. There are some less than credible review sites - usually the ones that constantly give high praise to every product, use rating systems, and issue lots of "Editor's Choice" type rewards and the like. Anandtech doesn't use point systems and they are very even handed. They expect you to read their perspective and experience with a product and decide for yourself. But benchmarks are benchmarks. Under a given platform and set of conditions a benchmark is only going to perform to a certain level. Under those same conditions with different hardware those benchmarks are comparable. I know this all seems obvious, but if it is, then I'm not sure why you would be speaking the way you are.
I find it interesting that you are quicker to trust a manufacturer's sales pitch than an independent reviewer's benchmarks. But as noted, even Intel claims that performance increase under server workloads. In gaming workloads, it just isn't beneficial. Games are not well threaded. Just because some games "can" use four or more threads doesn't mean that each one of those threads are running at 100%. Develops do this (partially) intentionally to be as inclusive as possible and hit the lowest common denominator of user hardware.
God Emperor Akhenaton
I never once said that an old i7 was as good as a new i7. All I said was that the 2008 i7 processors are extremely good by today's standards while the best video cards of the same era are not. If an old i7 is not going to perform as great today, then neither will the old i5.
What you said was: "
the old 2008 i7 processors are still better than the new i5 despite age" which I refuted. But then you were offended with what I was comparing - a modern $200 mainstream-level i5-3570 to the older $300 enthusiast-level i7-920. Compare it with the i7-965 if you want - a $1000 enthusiast level part at the time - but you won't see much of a difference. And in my mind the former is a fairer comparison as four years ago the OP would not have had $1000 allocated in their budget for a processor, just as they don't right now either.
Listen, there's nothing wrong with buying an i7 processor. But for most people's workloads it isn't advantageous enough to warrant the increase in price over an i5. Again - when it comes to gaming - the performance difference moving from , say, a Radeon 7950 to a 7970 on the other hand will be far more beneficial. If they have the money in their budget to get both, great, but they're looking at boutique shops here. They will be paying a premium for service, build quality and support on top of their hardware. Given their budget they probably
can't get a $400-500 graphics card
as well as a $300 processor. Telling them to build it themselves isn't beneficial because they're not interested. And that is why these boutique PC builders exist.
It doesn't matter how quickly or how slowly a generation of hardware may come or go; the OP is not going to replace their GPU when the next generation of cards comes out, so why should they care? If spending more money now on one piece of hardware
over another (not just in excess, but reallocating their resources) is going to get them better performance where they want it most that seems like a logical course of action. No?
