Did I make a bad decision getting an i5 6600K for Unity development?

I got one today for my first build, it was $200. Now I'm being told I made a bad choice not getting an i7, and I want to blow my brains out. Will the i5 suffice? I'll be overclocking it to 4.0 ghz or so, too.

 

Depends what you're developing I suppose.

 

Well, crap.

 

No I mean, I'm not saying it's bad LOL.
But it's also not the best either haha.

 

I have that in my VR machine I think and it's pretty fast. Sometimes I do Unity development on that machine and it seems fine.

 

Some of us are on fairly old hardware (Phenom II X4 965 here). It just depends on what you want to make. Unless you're planning on making a very high end game you won't have to worry. Having an i7 would have assisted with some aspects but the only difference between the i5 and i7 would be the time spent on them.

 

I'm using an i5-4590 and it's awesome. Who told you you made a bad choice? The President of the PC Master Race Club? Don't worry about it.

 

Most likely. I do loads of work on a mobile i5 machine, and it's great. I also have a beefy i7 desktop available, and often choose to work on my portable instead.

If you're doing super heavy lifting then yes, a gruntier CPU would be better, but for general development I find this i5 is more than enough. I certainly wouldn't be upset about "only" having an i5.

I personally wouldn't. You want a development machine to be stable and if you actually want to get work done then the less extraneous stuff you need to pay attention to the better.

With any decent CPU you're unlikely to spend much if any time waiting on it anyway, and in most cases a bigger CPU or an overclock is only going to make a fractional difference on that. So as long as your machine is fast enough the impact on your productivity of an incremental difference in performance will be fairly minimal. As I mentioned, I have a beefy i7 desktop but choose to use a mobile i5 a lot of the time anyway.

What you're doing is far more important than the hardware you're doing it on.

 

Wow, that's old. I'm going from a Pentium J2900 with integrated graphics to a 6600K and a 480, so it's a huge milestone for me and I didn't want anything to be messed up.

 

First time going into game development?

Chances are you aren't yet capable of making something that needs this much processing power.

 

You'll love it. Stop worrying about it and enjoy your new machine.

 

Thanks!

 

It's old but it has held up well. My next system will be using AMD's upcoming Zen series. It'll be an unusual build though with the goal of running multiple virtual machines at once so I need a processor that favors core count over core speed.

 

i5 on the desktop with 4cores is totally fine infact way better performance per cost ratio than i7, whoever told you that was a bad choice either has money coming out there ears or just completely stupid. Even better if you overclock it just remember to get good cooling, if the cooling is bad it will underclock itself underload.. often meaning you will be getting true core speeds below what you think its overclocked at underload.

And is it just me or did intel totally screw up(on purpose I imagine) the meaning of i5 and i7.. it used to be synonymous with i5 being 4cores, and i7 being 4+cores +ht..atleast for desktop from what I remember.

Now it seems i5 can mean anything from 2-4cores and maybe ht.... completely throwing out the window what it used to mean, oh and an i7 with only 2cores and ht.. like wtf .. it seems solely just to F*** with consumers and especially laptop buyers. Happen to be looking at one for family and comparing the price I paid for one of my laptops 3years ago..prices sure have gone up, you pay more for less..Must have gotten the bargain of the century as I can't even find a similar spec laptop without paying way more than before especially if its intel and you want 4cores. I guess all those S***ty windows releases 8 & 10 have taken the toll on consumers they just buy smartphones now, if you gonna have a S*** junk spyware riddled trash operating system like ios/android or win8/10, you might aswel have something that fits in your hand right.

bunch assholes really..

Also fuk intel and there stupid built in gpu S*** that no one wants.. it doesn't even complement a standalone gpu in any way, waste of silicon just to add up the costs... honestly i swear never buying an intel cpu again with this bullshit, i mean no need too upgrade, when the upgrade improvements are a joke and they won't increase number of cores to add value, instead they add useless crap like built in gpu that everyone has to pay for regardless of it being wanted or NOT.

AMD need to catch up, intel should be offering 6-8 cores at better prices by now its not 2010, instead they get away with selling 2core crap and jacking the prices up on additional true cores past 4, as they have no real competition.

 

According to them their new Zen series is showing promising results.

http://techfrag.com/2016/05/24/amd-zen-summit-ridge-twice-fast-fx-8350-par-intel-i7-5960x-extreme/

 

Intel has new chips coming soon so we'll see how well the Zen series holds up against those, I guess.

 

I think a bit of perspective is needed here. Graduating college is a big milestone. Releasing your first game is a big milestone. Quitting smoking is a big milestone. Updating your rig is definitely not a big milestone, and there's no such thing as a perfect system or a perfect time to upgrade. If you adopt that mindset, then you'll never upgrade waiting for that perfect time and you'll never be happy when you do upgrade.

"You did what? Man, you should have done that other thing instead" is one of the most common power plays that humans inflict on one another. Someone just got off on ruining the joy of your new rig for you, and you're playing right into it.

An i5 is perfectly fine for gaming. Ask on any PC gaming community and they'll tell you that the i5 is perfect for gaming and that the i7 is an overkill. And what's good for gaming is usually good enough for game development.

 

eh.. AMD compare there improvements over there past CPU's.. .but without comparisons on their CPU's against Intel.. and the price range, which is what really matters..

To me looks like they are still behind, they don't bring up benchmarks including the competition unless, well they haven't got anything that is better than the competition. So ball is still with Intel to price set on performance by the looks of it, while AMD can only try to offer better value at lower ranges.. and for anyone buying a laptop nothing is more silly than buying something low range. As they just aren't that upgradable after a year or 2.

Of course I still think AMD have plenty of good points, the fact they dont F*** users off without crappy motherboard changes all the time is a nice. And at least compared to intel S***lake cpu's aren't completely riddled with anti consumer /privacy technology.

 

I'm not convinced that either of these are always true. There were times in the past where the circumstances were ideal if not perfect for picking up fantastic hardware for a stupidly low price. My current processor, for example, was at the tail end of its lifespan. What normally would have cost about $200 to 300 only cost $80.

Another time I was on an AGP graphics card and everyone was in the process of moving to PCI-E but I couldn't afford to upgrade all of my components. At first I thought I would have to save up for a long period of time but I stumbled upon an ASRock motherboard that supported both the old slot and the new slot as well as the old DDR and the new DDR2.

Likewise upgrading your rig can be a big milestone. My best example would be my parents collecting enough money together to afford to upgrade from our ZEOS 386 @ 16MHz w/ 4MB memory to a Gateway Pentium @ 200MHz w/ 64MB of memory. That was a pretty big milestone as it gave me access to Windows as well as modern development tools.

Now after years of building and using nearly identically functioning systems I am in the process of assembling the parts necessary to build a computer that will be set up, managed, and used in a manner that is completely different from any computer I have used before.

TL;DR - It's all relative to the user.

That said you're spot on with this. You need to learn when to stop waiting and be happy with your choices.

 

Someone is about to splatter their brains all over their new i5 rig, and you're not helping, @Ryiah.

Allow me to rephrase: I wouldn't consider buying a new computer to be a big milestone for an adult making a middle-class income in a non-third world country. But of course, there are always exceptions to any rule. And what I stated is just my opinion and not a rule by any means.

 

put simply
the i7 is faster with more cache
and thats why you pay more

both will do the job
in the best case, computation wise, the best i7 will outperform the best i5 by roughly 25%
but, thats really only when all cores are used perfectly, otherwise the difference is like 5%

 

yeah did a couple of games on an ancient macbook white with core 2 duo.

 

Oh yes.
I'am actually on a 2009 config : Acer eMachines E525 Intel Celeron M 900 3 Go 160 Go 15.6" TFT (resting on my thighs, sitting on a sofa with my playing children nearby.) Not the best config but acceptable for working on certain stuffs, like animations/Mecanim. THIS is why i love Unity. Do the same with competitors.

 

When I'm on my computer 6+ hours/day, I consider it a milestone. Also I'm not updating one, I'm building one from scratch which I've always wanted to do, which I also consider a milestone.

 

Lol, I'm on Core2Quad Q9450 @2.66GHz and I don't have much to complain about. I can even run Fallout 4 on it, despite theoretically being bellow the minimum specs.

You'll be fine.

 

No. I kept my 5 year old dual CPU i5 rather than upgrade it to a 5 year old quad core i7 because you want to build and test on what your customers likely have. A brand new computer would not have helped me complete my game any more or faster than my 5 year old computer.

Anyway, it sounds like you paid $200 for a barebones i5, you could have bought a complete i7 6700 with 8GB RAM for $350 - $375, well lacking the monitor although you'd probably want to replace the 1TB HD with an SSD 1st chance you got.

 

I do most of my work on a laptop with a dual-core i5 and HD5000 graphics. The ridiculously fast SSD is what makes it doable. An i5-6600 is luxurious compared to that

 

Well uhhh, actually, the majority of notebooks in use today rely at least in part on Intel gpu's, and often solely on intel gpu's. The last couple few years now intel has made huge strides in making their integrated graphics faster and more functional for modern games. Obviously the gaming market demands more, but don't think the world doesn't want those power sipping intel gpu's, which already power a huge majority of consumer machines...

I agree AMD really has gotta step it up, but then again they always been the underdog and I kind of admire that. Still those i7's been smoking those AMD chips a good while now, so I hope AMD gonna ramp it up soon.

I'm some people

It's way easier for me as a lone indie, to just pack it up and take it on the go, develop from a hotel room or at a pals place. I use an i5 that's at least 3 or 4 years old, hasn't let me down working on mostly 2d mobile stuff.

Ironically, I wouldn't recommend an Intel gpu for development though, I use a dedicated nvidia card for unity, and gaming, and the Intel card for light use. But having my dev machine a notebook will likely never change even if I magically make a bazillion bucks. I need to be untethered from a big rig, free to roam and code haha.

 

I was mainly just talking about the desktop side of those cpu's where majority of consumers go with a dedicated gfx card and that onboard gpu makes zero sense as it only adds to end user costs. As an optional thing you pay extra for so you can fallback to onboard that is different but not what they want happening...

And intel have done that with all there new cpu's now
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88393/6th-Generation-Intel-Core-i5-Processors#@Desktop

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-Intel-Core-i7-Processors#@Desktop
...lumped with this sili-con now whether it will ever be used or not.

Obviously this isn't including the extra edition ripoff cpu's that dont have the onboardgpu, or the cpu's that are 6+cores.. but those are all way more expensiveness for what you get, and the average core count from intel hasn't and probably won't move to 6-8cores until the competition and market forces them too (the fact they happily flood the market with 2core crap says alot).. and I guess by then most will find intel single threaded performance crown will goto S*** as none of there cpu's with 6+ cores can reliably be clocked for high single threaded performance anymore. So the future for intel is screwing everyone now, and after that they are shot.

On the laptop/business/enterprise side cpu's with onboard gpu makes sense if they are not bothering with a dedicated gfx card or if on laptop side you do have dedicated gpu and want a fallback to the onboard gpu for low powersavings. However the price of this is that everyone pays and intel have pretty much screwed up the laptop market by doing so and squeezing out the competition at all ends of the market so they can make an even bigger cut for themselves. Can only imagine how AMD and Nvidia feel about what intel are doing here, I'm sure outcome will be seen in how things change in the market over the coming years. I think the general consensus will be F*** intel I'll buy whatever isn't from them in the future and for the industry it will be I'll work alongside any company that isn't them aswel. M$ and intel's cronyism has got a price to pay and it will be everyone watching them burn away.

 

I haven't looked into this, but I have a feeling that "majority of gamers" would be more accurate than "majority of users". In my experience the "majority of users" don't care, and will take whatever the salesperson or IT department tells them. Certainly the number of devices on the market with Intel GPUs doesn't suggest a lack of sales, and even on the Steam hardware survey ~17% of users are reported as using Intel GPUs.

Intel's GPUs aren't gaming beasts but they're otherwise quite capable and, as has already been pointed out, they suck quite a bit less power and generate quite a bit less heat than dedicated, 3D oriented chipsets. That i5 portable I do a lot of my game dev on these days also has an Intel 5xxx GPU, and I often prefer to work on that despite my beefy desktop having a GTX970.

 

Or their kids. Around here some of the more knowledgeable macOS users are in late middle to early high school.

 

"I haven't looked into this, but I have a feeling that "majority of gamers" would be more accurate than "majority of users". In my experience the "majority of users" don't care,"

I think people should be intelligent enough to figure it out for themselves what is meant under the context of the arguement.. yes majority of users might not fit entirely, but not all users who want decent gfx capabilities for a computer are just gamers so.

"Certainly the number of devices on the market with Intel GPUs doesn't suggest a lack of sales"
AMD have a heat problem, Intel have an tech advantage... they have taken that advantage to GPU's ... sales will be made regardless because what choice do consumers have, all intel cpus come with gpu now. If you're in the market to buy a computer with cpu+dedicated gpu, you're getting an onboard gpu whether you want it or not and you're paying extra for it because that's the upsale intel are forcing on buyers with the position they have right now.

 

Sure, but I wasn't talking about CPUs, I was talking about devices which only use the built-in GPU.

On one hand, yes, you're paying for it. On the other hand, what might the cost difference be for Intel to produce different products which are the same CPU with or without the GPU? It could well end up costing more to make it optional than it does to simply include it in every unit and not use it where it isn't needed. Making it optional would effect the entire production and sales pipeline - more design, more testing, different packaging, additional line items for sales and support, potentially factory reconfiguration...

 

Their cooler has a serious noise problem too. That said I stopped using stock cooling a while back. I use this instead.

 

I spend more time than that on my computer on most days, and yet I wouldn't consider updating my rig a critical milestone. Nor would I consider blowing my head off if I failed to perfectly execute said non-milestone in accordance with someone else's liking.

But it's your head and your rig and your definition of the word. Do with them as you will. As I said in my original post, I was just to offer a different perspective.

 

I've run Unity on an Intel Atom processor. Any Skylake processor will be fine.

 

That's what I did. Went with a hexacore and 32Gb of ram. The second 32 shows up today to bump it to 64, mainly for VMs.

 

I tried it briefly on my ancient Macbook. It's a Core 2 Duo @ 2.13GHz with 2GB RAM. The Standard Assets got 30 FPS.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-duo-2.13-white-13-mid-2009-nvidia-specs.html

How playable was it? I know you can mess with the INIs, use an ENB to optimize memory usage, and mod it to increase performance. Or at least you can with Skyrim. Might have to wait for the mods to be made for Fallout 4.

 

Standards assets have more to do with your GPU than CPU, so no worries there. As for how playable FO4 was, it was pretty playable. All I had to do was to close any RAM or cpu-hungry software I was running. Occasionally got drops to 25fps, but I use VATS for combat anyway so this wasn't huge issue for me. And that was vanilla, probably could do more with mods.

 

It faired much better on my old Core 2 Quad (Q6600) though, so definitely supportable / developable on older CPUs.

 

I have a high end (some years old by now, still pretty decent) i7-970 Hexacore in my main Rig, and had a i7-2600 in the Game Rig for a long time (swapped out now for a newer skylake i5, as I couldn't justify the cost of an i7 given it is only about 30% faster in about 5% of my usecases).

I have worked in Unity on both machines, and I have not once really found the performance in Unity being vastly different between the two machines, even though the bigger i7 having 50% more cores.

In fact, I deactivated hyperthreading in BIOS for the i7-2600 some years back to get a testbuild that got bottlenecked by the CPU back to 30 Hz... desperate, I know.
Good test though. Got a healthy increase in FPS as Unity 4 at the time wasn't able to use more than 4 threads anyway while running the game, and Hypertrheading actually imposing some overhead on your running logical threads, thus you get DOUBLE the amount of logical Threads at about HALF the max Frequency (because every logical core is now split in half) MINUS about 10% of the full power without hyperthreading (most probably due to the overhead of managing the two logical threads).


Don't worry about i7 for intels mainstream platform. They can be a good idea for specific application workloads that can utilize more than 4 cores (lightmap baking for example?)... in these cases, you get about 30% increase in performance over an i5.
In Unitys case, you will not see a difference in 95% of your usual workload.

Given you have such a specific workload, and can spare a little bit more money, moving up to the enthusiast class hardware and getting one of the cheaper intel hexacores might be a better idea anyway (though we are talking about more than just 100$ more here, as the cost of the enthusiast grade Mainboards is higher, and Hexacores still cost north of 500$ thanks to no competition in this segment).

You might even argue that, as long as hyperthreading is not deactivated in BIOS, the overhead of hyperthreading is eating away the slight clock advantage of the highest tier mainstream i7 when compared to the highest tier i5 in not extremly multithreaded applications, until the i5 is actually somewhat faster than the i7 even though having a slightly lower clock.

In contrast to the full system prices, the additional 100 bucks might not seem much (given the rest of a highend system you hopefully have when thinking about adding an i5 is at least around 1500 bucks in total), but when looking at the facts of what you get for that 100 bucks, I would go with a strong i5 over an i7 any day of the week on intels mainstream platform.
Its just not worth it for the few times you run something more intensive and having to wait 2 hours instead of 1 hour 30 minutes. Best case for the i7.


If you feel sorry about anything, it would be not having waited for AMD's new Zen generation of Desktop CPUs... given the IPC should be on par with Skylake at least, and the top Desktop processor is rumoured to have 8 cores, and 16 logical threads thanks to SMT (Hyperthreading in Intel slang), if the clocks are right and AMD prices them aggressively below the insane prices for intels Broadwell-E Platform, you could get a Processor that stomps all over intels 4 core mainstream i7 in multithreaded applications while keeping up in singlethreaded ones for way less than what intel asks you to put down for their Enthusiast class hardware.

All thanks to not having a iGPU onboard taking up more than half the die size that you most probably don't need anyway.

But then, this is another 6 months to wait at least until Zen finally comes, so it might have been too long for you anyway. And this is just AMDs word at the current point in time, and no pricing being known... we don't know yet if the 8 core Zen actually should put Intels 4 core mainstream i7 out of there misery, or if AMD uses the chance to attack intels higher end offerings with prices upwards of 500$...

 

good point @gian-reto alig

for artists, or if you need to bake a lot of stuff via cpu, it still makes perfectly sense to get the i7, at least for now since a lot of applications already switched to GPU rendering
it really depends on what you are doing and which programs you use