Yes, but he said the magic word. Which is "rendering".
If people do use computers only for gaming, then indeed going for an i7 instead of an i5+good GPU would be silly.
3ds Max however is one of the few programs that can suck the life force of every single core at 100% for quite some time. Certain scenes with global illumination etc, can take 30+ minutes to render in some computers. Merely having two cores instantly halves the time. Having four cores instantly halves the half time. AND because i7s also do hypethreading, that's 2 threads per core, that's 8 virtual cores. Which means that i7s almost half the half, half time over old quad cores as well!
Pour example'
I disabled 3 cores and hyperthreading and put a complex looking V-ray scene on 3ds-max and rendered it:
It took 816s
I restarted the computer with all cores and threads enabled and rendered the same scence, same angle etc.
It took 175.5s
Trust me, if your scene takes an hour to render this adds up, (not to mention animations. 24 renders for 1 second of playtime!) this can make the difference between your computer being locked up for a week, or a day.
The only thing better than 4 cores rendering is 4 overcloaked cores rendering of cource.
In addition, there is a hidden bonus there regarding chip slots. The i5, are slot LGA 1156 if I am not mistaken.
The i7 however are slot LGA 1366. The new 6 core chips if you noticed however (980) are also slot 1366, giving a possible upgrade path in the future, without having to change the motherboard. (When the 12 core chips will make the 6 core ones cheaper or something) The first generation of 12 core chips will also be LGA 1366.
overclocking isn't all its cracked up to be...
Au contraire' mein freund.
When it comes to rendering again, I rendered the same scene with the processor (920) set at stock speed (2.66Ghz), and overcloaked at (4Ghz).
Stock speed: 227s = 3.7 minutes
Overcloaked: 153s = 2.5 minutes
It's a 40%-ish decrease in time, as would be expected by a 50% CPU speed increase.
That might not be huge, but it is a noticeable difference, especially when waiting while staring at a screen for an image to appear. (And in hours, that would actually be 1.2 hours less)
