What? Explain this statement that seems like nonsense to my feeble non-hardware-savvy mind.

Three steps to understanding:

1. What's the difference between i7s and i5?
Slightly higher base clock, which is negated when OCing. The biggest difference is the number of cores (i7 = 4-6, i5 = usually 4) and that most i7s have hyperthreading.

2. Why is it not faster?
More cores don't help when a game doesn't offer more than 4 taxing threads, and currently the only game I'm aware of that does that is Simcity.
Under ideal circumstances (at least 2x as many threads than there are cores) hyperthreading can increase your CPU power by up to 30%. But hyperthreading is only faster when you have more threads than cores. This again, doesn't apply to games but to encoding, rendering and compressing tasks.

3. Why is it slower?
What hyperthreading does is split a core in 2 virtual cores. They share some hardware though, so when parts of one virtual core are waiting for an operation to finish the other can use the unused resources to do calculations of another thread. However this sharing technique does have some overhead to control proper operation, so when there's only 1 thread for 1 core it will run a bit slower.

Note: The "unless you're on a laptop" bit refers to mobile i5s which usually have 2 cores while some games offer 3 taxing threads.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Mar 28 2013, 1:33 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: improved logical structure

in non-games the i7 is significantly faster due to hyperthreading. In games i5 is insignificantly faster.

On laptops, 4 cores is tremendously useful, since it minimizes the effects of nearly everything else. If you run a virus scan while playing a game on a quad core, it's hard to tell. Easy to tell on a dual core.

So I should go for an i5 for gaming, even though I'll be rendering models, encoding large videos, and processing a large amount of files in general?

If you're serious about rendering and stuff get an nVidia Quadro. Costs 4x of regular gfx but the optimizations for workstation programs are really worth it.

If you're not get an i7 and a $200 - $250 gfx with 2GB. Check Ex's build for the rest.

The tangent about i5s better for gaming shouldn't concern you since this advantage is neglible compared to what an i7 gains you for non-gaming.

There is no doubt in my mind that the amount of encoding and rendering Pr0n is doing is more suited to a general gamer card as even Iskatu who probably did 10x more serious stuff didn't use or need a workstation card.

My i5 has hyperthreading I'm pretty sure.
Intel Core i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30Ghz 3.60Ghz

Here's an easy test to know for sure:

This is what Task Manager looks like for a quad-core processor with hyperthreading (i7-3770):

Note the eight core threads under CPU Usage History. If yours only shows four core threads for your quad-core processor, then you do not have hyperthreading.

Or short answer: I have the same processor as you at home, and no, the i5 does not have hyperthreading. The i7 version (2600K) does.

the i7 is better than the i5 plain and simple. it is not, however, worth 33% more for a 10-15% increase in performance in a very limited number of applications.

We're talking about the difference between chrome and firefox here. You're not going to notice that one is faster than the other. The limiting factor is and will always be some other component in your computer, or be pointless.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/551?vs=701