i7 is great CPU for games. If you know what games can use it. For me only cities skylines can really use 90% of it if you build really really big city and run tons of mods. That is a must for me because i love sim games and big sim games eat lot of cpu. ED? Not so much. I'd say i3 would rarely be problem here i5 is 100% safe choice lastly i7 is overkill for ED unless they are planning to use 8 threads to full for some reason. i7 performance is about 100% in 4 physical cores and additional 30% in logical threads. I benchmarked it in few programs and ht gave me about 20-30% more points. So if task manager shows 50% CPU usage then you can be sure that your cpu runs pretty much 75-80% of it's total computing power.
Bragging rights, don't forget that one!
At one time an i5 would get almost identical framerates of an i7 but not anymore. Take GTAV or Witcher 3 as an example. I7 makes a huge difference in minimum framerates.
Just posting for general interest.
Intel is laying off a lot of people. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/19/intel_q1_fy2016_job_cuts/
Intel is laying off a lot of people. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/19/intel_q1_fy2016_job_cuts/
Sure thing it's bottleneck, but I just trying to say, what ED can run well even on old Clarkdale i3 and even in VR. i7 is waaay to much for it, it's just an old specs for VR, before it got native support from Nvidia.