Core i7 vs i9

[Crayox13]

Hi guys,
I read how you guys prefer higher frequency cpus to more cores, of course up to a certain point. Do you think this Intel Core i9-7900X is good or should I get some top i7 model? Which as I see go up to 6 cores. I want a single cpu rendering machine. Will try GPU rendering too with GTX 1080 too but I kinda feel safer with cpu rendering.
Thanks

[vlado]

You can compare the relative performance of i9 7900X to other CPUs on our benchmark site:
https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/cpu

You can see that an i9-7900X is similar to an i7-6950X although there seems to be some variation in the results (maybe due to overclocking).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Crayox13]

Yeah, compared to i7-7820X it's a bit faster but i7 is almost half the price.

[allemyr]

Hi,

I guess the big difference in price between the i9 7900X and i7 7820X is because of the PCI-lanes they have which sometimes is important, GPU-rendering could! be one case. The difference in lanes is 28 for the i7 and 44 for the i9. Has been this difference for a while among the Intel i7/i9 lineup even when there only where i7 CPU's for sale.

For CPU rendering, the lanes doesn't matter so maybe the 7900X is a bad choice, it even has the same amount of lanes as the most expensive i9, the 7980XE.

The budget in any build is important even for the most expensive build, one is always on a budget, For a single build that you won't change parts in for a while I would go for a quite expensive CPU and save money, maybe save on other parts.
Had my Intel 2600k CPU for 7 years which I thought did a good job since I didn't use it that much , however it's expensive to change parts often, it's better to buy a system that you could use for quite a while in my opinion.

[Crayox13]

So now I have an old i7 3820 which is LGA2011 (as I recall those were demoted xeons or?) and I was thinking of going for that again since I feel these CPUs are sturdier that clasical ones, is that stupid? Also not sure what are socket options now.