Comparison of i3, i5, i7 Processor's || Which one should you Buy? ||

Do you often get confused with the Intel's processor line-up? Thinking about which processor Desktop or laptop to buy that should be able to fit your budget yet do all your important tasks. In here, I will first talk about some of the important things to look in a processor to declare it as best or average. Then I will tell you which should you buy?

1.     No of Cores

The first thing we all look is the no of cores the processor has. The benefit is you get better performance while doing multiple tasks simultaneously. The applications which are multithreaded get finished quickly as there get more threads and they can work on it simultaneously. Eg. Video Editing

i3 has 2 cores, i5 and i7 have 4 cores in general.

2.     GHz Number(Clocking or Clock frequency)  

Well, this number actually tells how powerful is your processor. Clocking is basically the no of CPU Cycles in 1 sec. Simply put, higher the number, better is your Processor.

i3 clocks around 3.4 – 4.2 GHz, i5 clocks around 2.4 – 3.8 GHz and i7 Clocks around 2.9 – 4.2 GHz.

3.     Turbo Boost

As the name suggest boost, you can boost up your processor’s clock frequency. Boosting the frequency can help in many ways like many of the high-end things can finish much quicker. You just have look at the heat dissipated, it should be below the normal range.

i3 does not have turbo boost while i5 and i7 have one.

4.     Cache Memory

You always have look at a bigger cache memory as it improves system performance. Cache is the fastest memory, faster than RAM. The cache stores something that is used more frequently by CPU. So, that processor doesn’t have to fetch everytime from RAM.

i3 has 3 – 4 MB of Cache Memory, i5 has 4 – 6 MB and i7 have 8MB of cache Memory.

5.     Hyper-threading

Hyper-threading is a feature that tricks the Operating System by making it think 1 physical core as 2 Virtual(logical) Core. You can view 4 tasks running in Windows Task Manager in a 2 core processor that has Hyper-threading. This actually helps, as 4 core is logically divided into 8 threads. And this helps in Video Editing and also for ultra high-end gaming.

i3 and i7 have Hyper-threading while i5 doesn’t have. Well, there are some dual-core i5 processors that have hyper-threading, but they too generally end up giving us 4 threads.

You can look up for these things while buying a processor. When you buy a processor you get to look at some weird model number of which you don’t understand a bit. Eg. i7 7700HQ. The first digit after i7 represents the generation. Here 7 represents 7^th (Kaby lake) generation. 700 represents the version in that particular generation. H stands for High performance and Q represents quad core.

List of some suffixes:-

Y – Extremely low power.

U – ultra-low power.

H – High performance.

T – low clock speed.

K – Unlocked.

If your model number ends with K, it means that you can increase the clock frequency in BIOS setting. Make sure to put two coolers if you clock above 4.6 or 4.7.

 Which One should you buy?

Well, this depends upon personal preference and by analyzing the above points you can figure out which is best for you?  My recommendation:-

If you are a general user who just surfs web, open word, powerpoint and listen to music then i3 is sufficient for you. If you also have to play some lighter games, i3 should work better with dedicated graphics card. i5 is for users who do more than this like using some mid-range applications like tally, photoshop, etc. i5 is the mid-range processor from Intel and is found in most of the laptops today. i5 with good graphics card should also be able to play high-end games. I recommend i5 7^th generation to those whose don’t know which to buy. i7 is the premium version available from Intel. i7 is for those who play ultra high-end games and does a lot of video editing. i7 7^th generation processor with a good graphics card is recommended for video editors.

I hope now you will be able to figure out which Processor is best for you. Finally, Thank you.