The new Core i5 is definitely a major step for the user that likes mid-range CPUs. Core i5-750 is going to arrive on the same price range of current mainstream CPUs but with a far higher performance for most applications. This is great news. The not so great news is that you will need a new motherboard to use it, so you won’t be able to upgrade your PC by just replacing the CPU: you will need to replace the motherboard and possible your memory modules as well, if you are not using DDR3 modules at the moment.

Core i7 will continue to be the CPU of choice for the professional user working with rendering and image processing and the new socket 1156 promises to give far more options of CPU and motherboard models to choose from in the future.

For the average user, Core i5 provides a better cost/benefit ratio than Core i7. It is true that Core i7 is faster than Core i5 even when we compare a Core i7 and a Core i5 running at the same clock rate as we did in our review, thanks to the Hyper-Threading technology that makes programs to “see” eight CPU cores instead of “only” four, but this difference in performance will be only worthwhile to professionals because a faster processing means more work done in less time, and thus more jobs for their clients and hence more money. We don’t see why a regular user would pay at least 45% more on a CPU that won’t give that much performance increase in return.

And this also applies for gamers. Gaming performance nowadays depends more on the video card than on the CPU – at least with the latest titles maximizing video quality. In summary, you will be better off buying a cheaper CPU and investing the difference on a more expensive video card than trying to have the most expensive CPU that you can afford. Thus if you are a gamer and want to have the latest Intel CPU, our recommendation falls on Core i5 once again. Unless, of course, you have a bottomless pocket and want to have the fastest PC in town: in this case buy a Core i7-975 with 12 GB RAM and two SSD’s in RAID0 and be happy!