[theandrewbailey]

Depends on what you have and how urgently you need the greater speed.

My main system is still running a i7-2600 from over 5 years ago. That GTX 680 I have in there is still plenty fast. The upgrade question is: how pretty do I want Star Citizen to be?

[noir_lord]

I'm still rocking an i5-2500 from the same generation.

It is still completely fine for everything I ask of it even against the much newer machine at work, with the upgrade to an SSD a while back it basically felt like a new machine.

[gsnedders]

I upgraded from a i5-2400 to a second-hand i7-3770K around a year ago given they're socket compatible: the difference between them is larger than the difference between the i7-3770K and the i7-6700K, from what I saw looking at benchmarks when I did this. There's certainly workloads where there's a noticeable different in performance.

[noir_lord]

I have an i5-3570K in the work desktop, I really don't notice that much difference though the i7-3770K was/is a beast in comparison, for my workloads I just don't see much benefit in the i7's, I'll likely get another i5, all the ones I've had have been excellent on the $/perf scale going back 5 years or so.

[akerro]

I would like to build a PC that would compile stuff quickly... Android, Java, Spring/Hibernate, some Rust and JS recently. Currently takes a few minutes to build any of my projects on a laptop I have. I think more physical cores will boost it more?

[mutagen]

First question, does that laptop have a SSD? Most developer machines do these days, that's the single biggest improvement to build times you can make. Then look at CPU, IO, memory utilization during builds to see where improvements can be had.

[akerro]

Yes, it comes with top fastest SSD and fast RAM.

[theandrewbailey]

Is that an NVME SSD or SATA SSD? NVME is about 4 times faster than SATA in terms of pure transfer bandwidth, though I'm not sure about random access speeds.

[akerro]

Well. it was the fastest when I bought it 3 years ago, it's SATA. I'm not buying another one, it would be wast of money, better get proper CPU and mobo.

[bitL]

NVMe makes sense only if you are either pushing bandwidth limits (e.g. processing large RAW 14-bit 4K/8K video on a scratch drive) or have hundreds of threads with concurrent I/O operations. In real world, you are barely going to notice any difference between SATA2 and SATA3 SSDs, not to mention M.2 PCIe ones.

[imtringued]

With SATA2 you might as well just use a HDD. Of course I'm assuming you actually optimized how your data is layout on the storage medium to take advantage of the sequential read speed of your HDD, SSD or even RAM. Even my HDD usually reaches 160MB/s so a SATA2 connected SSD is only twice as fast at four to six times the cost. Yes SSDs are better at IOPS but an application that heavily depends on IOPS is often a result of poor design.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/Q/0/378072/original/AS-SSD_Sequ...

[rkalla]

Generally speaking... "productivity" and media styles of workloads do better with more cores/high memory machines. Gaming typically does better with higher clock speeds (which means less cores in every case I've seen). If you want that in a laptop form factor though, I am not aware of Intel sticking massive-cored chips in the mobile form factor, so your choices will be limited to whatever the fastest i7 is you can pickup... unless you were thinking of building a desktop?

UPDATE - Oh mutagen's point about SSD is absolutely spot on... the faster the storage the better _first_... then worry about the rest of that stuff I mentioned.