Am I right in thinking...(CPU upgrade question)

[clarkey01]

That my current motherboard doesn't support a higher rated CPU than the one I already have?

I was thinking about a cheap CPU upgrade but after some brief research it appears I'm already running the best 1156 has to offer?

Also what is the best safe OC I can achieve with this chip? Last time I checked (2 years ago) 3.6 Ghz was safe-ish on air?


I may hold on upgraded and do my usual three year build cycle (due in Jan 2013)


Cheers

 

[lehtv]

Yep, that's right. LGA1156 goes as far as i7 8xx.

Your CPU is perfectly fine for a 5850. In the vast majority of games you're GPU bottlenecked. Hold on until Haswell (Q2/13).

Some i7-860 can be OC'd to 3.8-4.0 with high end air cooling and a stable mobo/ram. But 3.6 is more realistic. What sort of temps and volts do you have at 3.4?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Keep your CPU. Its a fine CPU and if any, wait till next year to upgrade it to Haswell. Its half a waste to upgrade your current.

 

[clarkey01]

lehtv, 27C Idle and 62c load after 4 hours of stress testing. I need to play with voltages, was thinking of going to 16GB of ram just to complicate things, may get the ram then try to get back to 3.4 and call it a day.

 

[AtenRa]

The combination of ASUS P7P55D-E and AAkasa AK-CCX-4002HP Venom CPU Cooler will allow you to OC the Core i7 860 up to 4GHz no problem.

Just buy 1600 or 2133MHz ram they are cheap these days.

 

[borisvodofsky]

lehtv, 27C Idle and 62c load after 4 hours of stress testing. I need to play with voltages, was thinking of going to 16GB of ram just to complicate things, may get the ram then try to get back to 3.4 and call it a day.

??

why do you need m0ar ram.

If you do decide to get 16gb, Make sure to get 2 x 8gb sticks instead of 4x4

Higher overclocking, AND much tighter timings. The cool part is you can safely use 1.65v 2400mhz CL10, CL11, or 1.65v 2133mhz CL9

Because this is 1156, timings and ram mhz make a larger difference than they do on 1155. 😀