Greetings,
 
Im a 58 year old  bass player who ocasionally uses a PC to write and record songs and I'm looking to get a new machine that will be used as a general work horse but will also run a daw at some point
 
Initially I was looking at Intel i7-6700 Quad Core Processor until I read the following in a computer magazine
 
'the Core i7 line is aimed at performance enthusiasts and those building systems for specialist purposes, such as 3D
animation or video rendering. Performance in normal gaming and applications won’t be much better than the fastest Core i5 chips,
and certainly won’t be proportional to the extra cost'
 
Would you guys say that recording in running a DAW is as 'Specialist purpose' ?
 
I realise that the more CPU grunt you have means you can have more Bass VST's running at the same time (Joke!) but I guess my question is this
 
Will there be an appreciable difference in an I5 system compared to an I7 one and is it worth paying 100 GBP for that difference
 
All comments welcome and thanks in advance for your time

 I may be wrong but an i7 has hyperthreading and the i5s don't.

i5 quad cores don't have hyperthreading - you only get 4 processing threads. But the dual core i5's have hyperthreading, so you can also get 4 threads with those, too. All the i7's have hyperthreading. 
 
As far as building an audio computer, I used a quad core i5 as the primary muscle in my DAW workstation for a few years without any problems at all. I work mostly in the box using synths and sample libraries, and a core i5 wasn't a barrier to getting stuff done. I had to be careful how I worked, sometimes -- I was very judicious about freezing synths, not overloading projects with needless plugins, etc -- but I was fine with an i5.
 
Take that with a grain of salt, of course, as that's just my own experience, based on my own workflow habits, etc, so your mileage may vary. But I personally think a well-spec'd i5 based system can make a perfectly usable DAW work station, especially if paired with a soundcard with solid drivers. Having good audio hardware and driver support is probably the most essential factor of all, I would think. I'd rather have a moderately powered i5 system with, say, RME interface and drivers, than a beast of an i7 system with dodgy audio drivers and hardware. 
 
I eventually moved to a quad core i7 -- and I just upgraded again to a 6 core i7 -- and I will admit the difference is marked, especially in terms of how many synths I can run, and how fast my system will bounce tracks and similar. But if I was working on a tight budget and building from scratch, I'd have no worries about going with an i5. Just make sure you get decent amount of quality brand memory, the best power supply you can afford, and solid audio hardware. So, if it was me I'd put 100 extra GBP into those elements, before I'd put it into an i7. 
 
Just my opinion, of course. I'm curious to hear what others think...

Soundcard wise I already have a Focusrite 2i2 and Im fairly happy with it..... still getting used to to using an external card after so may years of Soundblaster audigy & M audio 24/96  internal interfaces

For the small difference in cost (especially when considered across the life of the machine), I'd go with the i7 CPU.

Lots of people do run DAWs on i5s, especially in the Mac world (lots of Apple computers have i5s as standard, with i7s an option on some) and Windows laptops.

Having said that, a DAW is very much a "specialist" use for a computer, and makes similar demands on the hardware to a gaming machine in every respect but video and makes harder demands than gaming on the ability for near real-time audio. "Normal" computer use, including gaming, doesn't require the computer and OS to be giving constant attention to audio streaming with no gaps longer than whatever the interface audio buffer is set at. If Windows looks away from Word, a browser or even a game for 15 or 20 milliseconds it's unlikely the user will even notice. A DAW running at low ASIO buffer settings to get low audio latency will notice and audio will crackle and pop or drop out as soon as the ASIO buffer is empty. So if you have your ASIO buffer set to give e.g. a 10ms round trip, as soon as Windows looks away to meet another system request for more than 10ms you get audio engine dropouts. Processor speed and power helps keep Windows' attention where it is needed, as do more cores.

If the budget runs to it I would go for an i7 over an i5 every time. With perhaps three exceptions. An affordable i5 with a significantly higher clock speed than the fastest affordable i7 may have an edge in some ways, so long as the number and nature of plugins used doesn't mean the i7's hyperthreading (or extra cores in the case of mobile processors) would make a difference. The second exception is if you're using a laptop and extended battery life is important, as i5s generally demand less power than i7s.

The third exceptin is that if using an i5 rather than i7 means you can't get low enough round-trip latency figures and/or need to freeze tracks more than you would with an i7. Only trial and error can really confirm whether that would be an important issue for you. Freezing tracks just takes a little time (though it irritates some people because they find it a break in smooth workflow), but an inability to get low enough latency can be a real show-stopper.

Another relevant issue is that poorly written ASIO drivers can substantially reduce the performance of the entire DAW, so in many ways it's best to consider the proposed system as a whole. If the alternative to an i5 and a good interface woth good drivers is an i7 but a lower quality interface with indifferent drivers I'd go for the i5 in that situation.

I think that you have some sound advice above, on the differences.  
 
Since you are discovering the appropriate CPU - I would suggest discovering the appropriate mother board.  For two reasons - how long will its service cycle in years be, to support new and faster CPU's that you can just swap out.  For example - the latest i7-6700k probably won't be the last int the 1151 socket design - and if so, there will be more, which are bigger better badder coming on line at a high price now, and in a few short years, drop to an affordable price.  For the second example, as I studied for my own build - there are connectivity options that are just coming on line now in mother boards, that might be required in a future upgrade of an audio interface you would consider.  
 
USB2 certainly does rather well for most small to medium home systems.  Isn't hard to cover that base - most every mother board has multiples of these.
 
Thunderbolt has been out a while now for some audio interfaces, and PC mother board manufacturers are ramping up production. The exciting thing about the TH3 standard is it clocks in at 30 ghz which means really low round trip latency - play it, hear it now speeds.
 
USB3 has been out for a while for some audio interfaces.  It improves on the throughput of USB2. 
 
 
AVB has been out a while for some audio interfaces - however,  the only way to use it with windows currently, is to buy an ECHO card,  because they have worked out device discovery and the asio drivers.   There are two audio device companies that I know of that are working on their own asio implementation, but from what I gather (my overall knowledge of these things is certainly entry level) - without the operating systems support directly, its a rather large task to work through.  I made sure that my network port hardware was AVB-TNS compliant so I did not have to buy a new network card when AVB comes online.  While AVB is not as fast as Thunderbolt - it allows for multiple devices connected via an AVB switch, to connect into the PC.  It also holds the promise (not that hardware companies are under an obligation to do so) that you could use a device from company A, a device from company B (up to 512 channels) together.      
 
USB3 has been out for a while for some audio interfaces.  It improves on the throughput of USB2.
 
Take care,
 
LL
 
 

USB3 has more bandwidth than USB2, but unless you're recording a serious number of inputs, way above the 16 or so most larger interfaces have, it won't make any improvement over USB2 because USB2 has more than ample bandwidth to cope. I can run my UFX/ADAT combination over Firewire 400 without maxing out the bandwidth.

Where TB may have an advantage is in performance for lots of inputs, such as the kind of setups found on high-end PCIe based studio systems with big desks. Even they don't beat the best USB/Firewire interfaces by more than a very few milliseconds though. Even optimised digital mixers (or digital guitar fx) add some latency.

The difference between 5 milliseconds latency and 2.5 or 3 isnt really very meaningful in real world usage, and any plugins used will probably add enough latency of their own to even out the performance.

The big thing about TB, to my mind, is that it allows PCIe speed hardware to be added to laptops (and it's the only way to add PCIe cards to anything Mac). A laptop with TB and a TB hub gains quite a lot of scope for expansion, even if it is wired. Which is useful to people who spend some time working in a studio-type environment but also need a portable computer.

As Jim says, the catch with TB is that anything TB is currently at premium prices. A basic single 2.5" TB2 drive enclosure costs more without the drive than a complete 2TB USB3 drive. Another issue is that much of what's marketed as TB/USB3 is really USB3 internals with a TB socket welded on. Which means you can't use SSDs in such a case and run the TRIM command on them (TRIM commands can be passed over TB but not USB). It's like the USB drives marketed as "USB2 and 3 compatible" or similar, which means USB2 but will work if connected to a USB3 socket.

Rather how the TV industry markets 720p TVs as "HDTV Ready" in the UK, a weasel-worded practice especially common shortly before HDTV was launched. What they really mean is "not actually, real, proper HDTV but it can decode the signals.” Or how a Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes unless you're a hard drive marketing manager when a GB=1,000MB. :-/

My PC has an i5 in it.  I don't think it supports hyperthreading: Intel Core i5 2500, S1155, Sandy Br 1 £135.15
 
I've listed the price I originally paid here (in 2011), as I recently looked to see if I could get an i7 in the LGA 1155 package and both the i5's and i7's are much (much!) more expensive now than back then (even for a CPU which is several LGA packages behind the times).
 
Following the recent unmitigated 'upgrade my PC' disaster (see the 'Perhaps I should have...' thread for some excellent advice, i.e. do the exact opposite of what I did), I've decided to stick with what I have.  I did upgrade the gfx card to an GTX 970 for Overwatch release day, however :-)
 
For most of us normal(ish) folk, the i5 vs i7 question boils down to this sort of decision:
 
You can buy a really nice sports car for X.  It has more power than you'll ever need, and it goes faster than you'll ever make it go.
 
OR
 
You can buy 'really nice sports car plus' for more than X.  It has even more more power than you'll ever need, and it goes even more faster than you'll ever make it go.
 
 
 

i look at it even more simply than that...
 
least hamstrung for future upgrades.