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Affordable Upgrade From I5-2400

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ddpaulb

Member
Socket 1150 i3, FX, or A series. Which would be best? I don't want to spend $100 or so on another 1155 mobo.

Usage: audio recording and sequencing, games.
 
Only worthy upgrade is Devils Canyon when it debuts next month and if you go with a i7, this being far out from your budget. Got a locked down i5 as well being the i5 2500 so know the itch.

I am giving some thought to a cheap Z77 board so with a little work i could get a 3.8-4ghz oc, perhaps you could grab one and see where you land with your i5.😀
 
ddpaulb said:
Socket 1150 i3, FX, or A series. Which would be best? I don't want to spend $100 or so on another 1155 mobo.

Usage: audio recording and sequencing, games.
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Impossible to say without a budget.

Outside of an i7-3770 your 1155 socket options are expensive for little gain. ~$190 might result in a 20% boost upgrading to an i5-3470.

A high end haswell i3 on average would match up evenly against your quad-core i5-2400, but not in encoding where the 4 cores can be used; not a good choice for your use case.

Going with an 1150 board and an i5-4570 might net you another 10% over the IB, but now you're spending ~$300 for new mobo and CPU. This is probably your best bet though if you truly want to upgrade.

An even better bet would be to wait 1 more year. The slow rate of advancement thing really makes it hard to honestly recommend someone upgrade from a Sandy Bridge part at this juncture. I think Intel's next CPU line in 2015 is the one to go for if you can wait.
 
Skylake really looks like a true upgrade, willing to bet just about everyone on Sandy on these forums will be upgrading to it next year.
 
I agree, hold out for the first DDR4 platform which should be Intel's Skylake next year. Best to just start setting aside "new build" funds in the meantime.
 
Well, if he has the annual computer budget to throw in a Haswell i7 + good 1150 motherboard just to last him a year, sure. Otherwise save for Skylake.
 
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Not really, especially not without a motherboard change.

I'd wait if I was you, that is a good processor and even the 3770k is not that significantly faster. Yeah sure 20% to 30% performance increase overall is great, but its not like night and day, it will be for example from 180 seconds encoding to 150 second encoding, barely noticeable in the grand schemes of things.

Plus nerwer motherboards don't really have any advantages, I mean if you have USB3 on ur mobo and 6gpbs sata then you aren't missing out at all.

I'd actually buy a decent SSD drive for $200 and be done with it, it will significantly improve encoding/decoding, file transfer, programs startup, OS startup and games loading times!
 
skipsneeky2 said:
Skylake really looks like a true upgrade, willing to bet just about everyone on Sandy on these forums will be upgrading to it next year.
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Except that Skylake may not be coming next year (instead 2016), and we don't know nearly anything about how much it will increase performance.
 
Fjodor2001 said:
Except that Skylake may not be coming next year (instead 2016), and we don't know nearly anything about how much it will increase performance.
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It's still true that there's no other broadwell LGA other than quad core with GT3e in the roadmap. We know of k version only so I guess there are at most two chips, i5 and i7, that will probably release in Q1 2015.
I'm pretty sure Intel can afford to start a new line of LGA desktop just 6-9 months after, say Q3 15, especially because it will be a year or plus since Haswell refresh (that too happened just 1 year after original Haswell).

To OP: think if you really need that upgrade, or maybe you can sell your chip and get a new mobo+cpu now.
 
SlickR12345 said:
Not really, especially not without a motherboard change.

I'd wait if I was you, that is a good processor and even the 3770k is not that significantly faster. Yeah sure 20% to 30% performance increase overall is great, but its not like night and day, it will be for example from 180 seconds encoding to 150 second encoding, barely noticeable in the grand schemes of things.

Plus nerwer motherboards don't really have any advantages, I mean if you have USB3 on ur mobo and 6gpbs sata then you aren't missing out at all.

I'd actually buy a decent SSD drive for $200 and be done with it, it will significantly improve encoding/decoding, file transfer, programs startup, OS startup and games loading times!
Click to expand...

I got it. Newer motherboards no advantage. I should just get a good quality motherboard (Asus or Gigabyte) for my 2400 and a good quality ssd would be money well spent not wasted. It also sounds like going to Haswell or AMD would be crossgrading and not gaining anything also.

As for motherboards around $100 how do I decide which one? Since I'm not overclocking do I decide based on slots and price?
 
SAAA said:
I'm pretty sure Intel can afford to start a new line of LGA desktop just 6-9 months after, say Q3 15,
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Based on what? I don't thik Intel has announced any release date for Skylake. So unless you have some inside info, you'd just be guessing I suppose...?
 
Fjodor2001 said:
Based on what? I don't thik Intel has announced any release date for Skylake. So unless you have some inside info, you'd just be guessing I suppose...?
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Yes it's all supposition for now, but it's based on the last leaked slide and this one, that fits very well:
http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Intel-Broadwell-K-Series-Proce
Look at how broadwell-k and haswell refresh LGA are supposed to span together for some time (dual-quad core gt2 parts + quad core gt3), then Skylake overtake them both having the same specs upgraded (dual-quad core with gt2 and gt4). So unless the Haswell refresh last longer than a year (so more than the predecessor) I can't see any reason for Skylake to release in 2016, maybe the mobile will, sounds plausible?
 
Why anyone would buy a Z77 or Z87 board at this point really makes no sense whatsoever. Z87 is a dead end, it will not work with Devil's Canyon or Broadwell. Z97 will.

Z87 will work with Haswell refresh, but it stops there. If you want a new motherboard, buy a Z97 or H97 for a forward looking motherboard. Z87 doesn't provide you with an option for Devil's canyon or broadwell, the max you can get the Haswell refresh.

As far as the AMD side, the real question is why. You get what you pay for, which in the case of AMD CPUs, is not a good thing. AMD is what you get for low performance when you can't get intel. Even the FX CPUs are inconsistent, they perform fine in some apps but anything that is IPC bound? Will run substantially better on intel CPUs. Even the FX-8350 is often outperformed by intel i3's precisely because of this. Hence, if you want the best forward looking CPU the best bet is to get H97/Z97 and whatever CPU you can buy based on that. What I wouldn't do is buy Z87 because you're locked in without the ability to get broadwell later.

What you could perhaps do is wait for a cheap H97 board. There's no rush I assume? Now it will probably be more costly than 100$. Maybe not. But you get the better forward looking option since you can get Broadwell or DC as I mentioned down the road, know what I mean? So if you get H97, a year from now you can upgrade to a Broadwell i3 or something along those lines. Whereas if you get a dead end z77 board or z87 board, you're stuck without spending more on a mobo. So yeah. My recommendation is buy H97. And then you can buy WHATEVER 1150 CPU you want and can afford. And you have the option to upgrade to Broadwell or DC down the road. That's really the best bet.
 
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SAAA said:
Yes it's all supposition for now, but it's based on the last leaked slide and this one, that fits very well:
http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Intel-Broadwell-K-Series-Proce
Look at how broadwell-k and haswell refresh LGA are supposed to span together for some time (dual-quad core gt2 parts + quad core gt3), then Skylake overtake them both having the same specs upgraded (dual-quad core with gt2 and gt4). So unless the Haswell refresh last longer than a year (so more than the predecessor) I can't see any reason for Skylake to release in 2016, maybe the mobile will, sounds plausible?
Click to expand...

I'm seeing Broadwell-K lasting ~16 months, like previous Intel desktop CPU generations lately. That puts Skylake in 2016Q2/Q3. If any earlier, there would be no point in releasing Broadwell-K in 2015Q1+.
 
Fjodor2001 said:
I'm seeing Broadwell-K lasting ~16 months, like previous Intel desktop CPU generations lately. That puts Skylake in 2016Q2/Q3. If any earlier, there would be no point in releasing Broadwell-K in 2015Q1+.
Click to expand...

Well if that really happens we would be stucked at the same level of performance for more than 5 years... Better get an H97 and a Devil Canyon chip as soon as they release if it's so, likely broadwell won't be such and upgrade and the day Skylake release it will need a new mobo anyway.
 
ddpaulb said:
I got it. Newer motherboards no advantage. I should just get a good quality motherboard (Asus or Gigabyte) for my 2400 and a good quality ssd would be money well spent not wasted. It also sounds like going to Haswell or AMD would be crossgrading and not gaining anything also.

As for motherboards around $100 how do I decide which one? Since I'm not overclocking do I decide based on slots and price?
Click to expand...

Honestly if you are not an overclocker or big game enthusiast and are going to ditch this in 12-18 months, you should probably go for something kinda cheap but reliable and sink that money into an SSD.

Microcenter has this : GA-B75M-HD3 LGA 1155 B75 for $65. B75 is the "stability" chipset that winds up in a lot of business desktops. You don't need to get anything fancy or performance oriented if you're not regularly pushing the system. Motherboards might make +/- 2% difference in performance. Not worth it.

If you don't already have an SSD though, getting one will definitely change your computing experience. We're talking <10s boot-up times vs 30-40s with a HDD (if it's a fairly clean build) and application load times that can be 5 - 20x faster than with an HDD.
 
SAAA said:
Well if that really happens we would be stucked at the same level of performance for more than 5 years... Better get an H97 and a Devil Canyon chip as soon as they release if it's so, likely broadwell won't be such and upgrade and the day Skylake release it will need a new mobo anyway.
Click to expand...

I don't think you'll be able to get Devil's Canyon (enthusiast Haswell) for the ~$300 we're talking about here. Quite likely that will be a $400 chip for use in a $150+ motherboard.

Broadwell is probably the way to go (and wait for) if needing / wanting an upgrade from SB anytime soon, but even Broadwell won't be around until Q4 2014 / Q1 2015.

Intel has been pretty quiet about Broadwell performance though (except power), so I don't expect it to do anything more than the 'normal' 10% or so performance bump vs Haswell (on compute intense tasks).

However, those little bumps do compound this many generations out. VS Sandy Bridge I'm guessing Broadwell would be 30-40% faster at a given clock on compute intense tasks. That's would be noticeable in many situations. Just sad that it takes a solid 4 years to make that kind of gain.

I'm thinking Broadwell will be the death knell for the AMD FX chips too.
 
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