fluffy wrote:Would it be worth anything to me to swap over to the i5 with a fresh format and my better components?
My prediction would be that the observable difference
would not be worth the time spent rejiggering the two installations. It's essentially a dual-core i5 at 3.2GHz with hyperthreading (only looks like 4 cores), versus an actual four-core Core2 at 2.5Ghz.
If the question was which of those two to buy today, the i5's greater feature set is probably the way I would lean towards investing new money. But for two machines you already have, I think the trade-offs of "more cores at 2.5" versus "less cores at 3.2" would end up showing little if not flat noticeable performance difference.
The trade-off in my mind being "I have faster CPU cycles on the i5, but am now sharing those cycles more often with Windows and other code, because there are less real cores to schedule on." If it had been a 2nd-generation or later i5 with four actual cores, the recommendation would have definitely gone the other way, with four 3.2Ghz cores up against four 2.5 cores.
But for the specific machines you have now, I think you'll be just as happy without investing time in the swap. I don't spend time diving deep into performance, so feel free to prove me wrong. This is just what I would expect and what I would do, based on the prominent features of these two choices.
-Trench
