is hyperthreading worth it?

[blaze15301]

Like the title says is hyperthreading worth the extra money? I have looked at the 2500k and the 2600k compared. to me it does not look like hyperthreading is that big of a deal , but i could be missing something. so what is you guys opinions on the matter.

[NightrainSrt4]

If you aren't using a lot of multi-threaded applications the general consensus seems to be save the hundred dollars and go with the 2500k.

[Fuganater]

Get the best you can afford is what I say.

[billygoat333]

I agree with both of the above. :D

[Kayin]

You need to look at what you're doing, does HT speed up or slow down the app, and how important is that app to you. If it helps, use it, if it doesn't, don't. I dumped my i7 for a dual Xeon system because HT didn't help, cores did. 8 cores works better (for my usage) than four with HT.

[Fuganater]

I want an SR-2 mobo *drools*

[x88x]

My personal opinion? HT is BS. One of those things that made sense until I learned what it was actually doing....

Basically, if you're running a lot of light-weight processes at once, HT might be useful. If you're running any heavy processes, HT is basically useless. Since all HT does is let more processes run at once, personally I would rather run fewer processes at any given time but concentrate on actually getting them done faster...

[Kayin]

I don't have an SR-2, I went backwards to S771. I'm poor, and my connections don't work any more. It's more like poor man's SkullTrail.

[Neodymium]

I don't think it makes any difference in most situations. There was a test done on some forum (don't remember which one...I'll try and find it). They used an i5 760 (2.8 GHz) and i7 860 and ran the IntelBurn Test for stability. The i7 860 (also 2.8 GHz) has HyperThreading, which was the only difference. Both produced about the same number of GFlops even when the 860 had hyper-threading turned on.

The conclusion was that the only benefit is when a program leverages all 4 cores already but utilization is not 100% all the time. It will take the remaining idle time and try to use it more effectively. Most of the time, there's no application for this unless it's across multiple intensive applications or the often quoted example of video encoding :)

With most of the newer processors (especially the unlocked ones), HT is almost nothing but done...

[Konrad]

I disagree with ol' x88x ... HT can significantly increase computational performance. Under specific conditions: 1) certain kinds of parallel-data computation, 2) assuming hardware/firmware/OS actually enable and optimize and actually use the available HT capabilities.

Agreed, that if you need increased performance then spending more $ for increased performance is good. But, having said that, Intel's robbery means that HT is overhyped and overpriced and I suspect there's a point where it's more economical to just buy more or better physical processor cores.