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I'm looking at getting an i7-3770 to replace my i5-2500K in my aged 1155 LGA based PC. Clock speeds are quite similar, and Ivy Bridge was a fairly small improvement over Sandy Bridge microarchitecturally.

The main boost I'd get is 4 additional (logical) cores from Hyperthreading.

Will Visual Studio build faster and be snappier with those 4 hyperthreading cores? Or would I be better off just saving my money?

Peter Cordes
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XJonOneX
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  • Compiling may scale decently with hyperthreading; one way to guess might be to profile with performance counters and look at instructions per cycle. (If anywhere near 3 or 4, one thread is already keeping your Sandybridge cores pretty busy. OTOH, two threads competing for cache and OoO exec resources will hurt, not scaling perfectly.) But unless it's very cheap, I'd just save up for a much newer mobo/CPU/RAM with more cores and faster cores, and larger faster caches. We've come a long way since Ivy Bridge, although it's not a bad microarchitecture. – Peter Cordes Oct 23 '22 at 15:45
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    BTW, the purchasing advice part of the question is mostly off topic; questions primarily about that belong on https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ – Peter Cordes Oct 23 '22 at 15:48
  • Related: [GNU make: should the number of jobs equal the number of CPU cores in a system?](https://stackoverflow.com/a/60349644) - on Zen 2, yes it seems to help nicely, about 1.4x speedup with GCC. I'd guess MSVC is similar. With a huge number (128) of Zen 4C cores on AMD Bergamo, no it doesn't help, though: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9754-smt/6 shows a slowdown for SMT enabled. But Zen 4C doesn't have much L3 cache per core to start with. – Peter Cordes Jul 27 '23 at 20:26

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I pulled the trigger on the i7-3770, and it knocked the initial build time and deployment to the Android emulator of my MAUI app down from 4m55s to 3m30s. That's a speed increase of 40%, for a time reduction to 71% of the previous time.

So yes, Visual Studio build time does benefit from Hyperthreading. :) And whatever other benefits IvyBridge brings over Sandybridge, plus a small bump in clock speed, but most of the benefit can be attributed to Hyperthreading.

(Gotta set the max number of parallel project builds under Tools>Projects and Solutions>Build And Run to how many cores you want to use, in my case, 8)

Peter Cordes
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XJonOneX
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  • 1 min 25s out of what total time? Was is nearly a factor of 2 speedup (perfect scaling with number of logical cores), or was it only like 20% faster? – Peter Cordes Oct 29 '22 at 03:12
  • The previous build and deploy time was 4:55, new time was 3:30. If my morning math is right, that's 28% faster? – XJonOneX Oct 29 '22 at 10:41
  • 210 seconds is 71% of the previous time of 295 seconds. Or 295s is 140% of 210s, so it's 40% faster. A throughput increase of 40%, in terms of number of builds you could complete in an hour for example. – Peter Cordes Oct 29 '22 at 17:06
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i don't think upgrading to i7-3770 will make much difference , you should save money and go for something like b450 motherboard + ryzen 5 2400G (4c/8t) or higher | note: i assumed that you will buy used hardware since you are on budget , the 2400g cpu is cheap at the moment and is almost like i7-3770 , the b450 motherboard has the ability to use m2 ssd and ddr4 ram which can help you alot later if you are going to use something like docker or virtualization

Mahmoud Ow
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  • Ryzen 5 2400G prices online right now (335$ CAD) are worse than 2600 (6c12t) 257$CAD, or newer CPUs like Ryzen 5 5600 (6c12t) for 228$, just looking randomly at a couple on Amazon.ca. Seems unwise to buy a Zen1 new at this point when Zen4 is already out, and Zen3 has been around for a while. If you want built-in graphics, I assume there are good options among newer CPUs. Or do you mean in the used market? – Peter Cordes Oct 23 '22 at 16:03
  • The guy is on budget , he is using i5 gen 2 and he is going to buy i7 3770 (used), so my personal opinion was built on upgrading to used hardware and not purchasing new equipment from amazon also i said 2400g not anything higher because it's almost identical to i7 3770 so he will not get less than what he wished for but he can get better for sure and it all depends on budget (take a look at prices of used hardware to understand my point) – Mahmoud Ow Oct 23 '22 at 19:11
  • The upgrade to an i7-3770 makes sense because it can fit in the same motherboard as i5-2500k. If you're needing a new mobo anyway, you don't need to stick to quad-core CPUs. A used hex or octo core machine might not be much more expensive, but might be a lot better for compile times if their usual builds involve many separate files getting rebuilt. – Peter Cordes Oct 23 '22 at 19:14
  • the main point in my opinion is to get better motherboard and dont buy i7 3770 as final upgrade to the current mobo he have , if he bought b450 the last thing he will consider as a problem is upgrading the cpu since the mobo support alot of cpu's with a wide range of capabilities he can start with just any cpu then i'ts gonna by easy to upgrade the cpu later – Mahmoud Ow Oct 23 '22 at 19:19
  • Ok, then explain that upgradeability benefit of that mobo chipset in your answer. (Although really that kind of advice belongs on https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/. The part that's on topic for SO is just whether VS build times benefit much from Hyperthreading.) – Peter Cordes Oct 23 '22 at 20:14
  • i was just trying to help the guy, can you please make another seperate answer and tell him your advice – Mahmoud Ow Oct 24 '22 at 06:02