Have you sped up your upgrade cycle, slowed it down, or neither?

[myocardia]

Two r9 290x in one box. I have other systems but nothing interesting. Yes, 5.1 right now.

Haha, nice! I'm assuming that you also (along with SlowSpyder) watercool your FX? When I was researching the CPU to build my signature system 16 months ago, I was seriously leaning toward either a 9590 or a 9370. From early in 1999, when I grabbed a 450 Mhz K6-III within a few days of launch, until Sept 2007, when I bought a G0 stepping Q6600, I owned exactly zero Intel CPUs, so I had really, really been wanting to "get back" to AMD.

Had I lived any farther north than I do (Texas, where highs of 100°F aren't rare at all), I'm pretty certain that I would have gotten a 9590 or a 9370. I almost did, anyway, but decided at the last minute that a 4790k for $300 during the after Xmas sale at newegg would be better suited for me, at least where I live. Yeah, I briefly considered the Haswell-E 5820k, but decided against it for exactly the same reason as I had the FXs, even though the 5820k was on sale at the same time for $349. Good luck, and welcome to anandtech. I didn't ever get a chance to welcome you in that first thread of yours to which I responded!

 

[jpiniero]

Two r9 290x in one box. I have other systems but nothing interesting. Yes, 5.1 right now.

A 9590 OC AND 290X CF? Yikes. What's your power bill like?

 

[Avalon]

Slowed down significantly. I used to upgrade once a year. It's been 4 years since I've upgraded.

 

[Vortex6700]

Haha, nice! I'm assuming that you also (along with SlowSpyder) watercool your FX? When I was researching the CPU to build my signature system 16 months ago, I was seriously leaning toward either a 9590 or a 9370. From early in 1999, when I grabbed a 450 Mhz K6-III within a few days of launch, until Sept 2007, when I bought a G0 stepping Q6600, I owned exactly zero Intel CPUs, so I had really, really been wanting to "get back" to AMD.

Had I lived any farther north than I do (Texas, where highs of 100°F aren't rare at all), I'm pretty certain that I would have gotten a 9590 or a 9370. I almost did, anyway, but decided at the last minute that a 4790k for $300 during the after Xmas sale at newegg would be better suited for me, at least where I live. Yeah, I briefly considered the Haswell-E 5820k, but decided against it for exactly the same reason as I had the FXs, even though the 5820k was on sale at the same time for $349. Good luck, and welcome to anandtech. I didn't ever get a chance to welcome you in that first thread of yours to which I responded!

Thanks for the welcome; I'm happy to be here with you. I normally have mine at 5.5 (Water, Sealed, 240mmRad, push/pull) but I forgot to reconnect a molex and turn on temp protection and now it is getting an Illegal Sumout error in my bi-weekly 24hr p95 tests. You definitely chose the better performing CPU, but indignance is part of the fun. Those summer temps would have meant reverting to stock for half of the year. Hopefully zen will be better p/w and you can come back to the dark side!

A 9590 OC AND 290X CF? Yikes. What's your power bill like?

Well, I leave for months at a time for work and my fiance always forgets to turn the thermostat up/down when she leaves for work. There is no difference in the monthly power bill. Thus, my PC costs about the same as forgetting to turn down the thermostat when you leave for work. I pay about $200/mo (nuke).

Temperature, on the other hand, is a different story. There is a 10 degree delta between my office and the rest of the house when it has been on for a while (65F/75F).

But can you put a price on making your lights flicker when you alt-tab back into Arma 3?

 

[mysticjbyrd]

Greatly slowed. I haven't built a complete new system in 5 years. Prior to that, I was building a new system every couple years.

 

[myocardia]

Those summer temps would have meant reverting to stock for half of the year. Hopefully zen will be better p/w and you can come back to the dark side!

If I happen to build myself a Broadwell-E system, then I'll be able to just use this 4790k for video transcoding and virtual machines. I'm leaning right now towards buying an 8C/16T Zen for video transcoding and VMs, though. I'm honestly having trouble justifying to myself spending extra (most likely) on Broadwell-E, when I'm still going to be GPU-bound, even after adding a 16nm GTX 970/R9 390-class GPU to this 4790k system. I've decided to just see which of the two, Zen or Broadwell-E, have the highest performance per watt. I'd take a lower IPC 8C/16T 95 watt CPU every time, over a higher IPC 6C/12T CPU with a higher TDP, as long as the 8C/16T 95 watt CPU has decent IPC, and let's say ~2.5 Ghz base frequency. All of the above is assuming that there is nothing horrendously wrong with either uArch (or chipset), of course.

 

[repoman0]

I probably won't upgrade from Z68 or this 290 until I need to drive a nice 4K/120Hz 30+ inch OLED like the new Dell (once they come down in price) (also unless another free or cheap minor upgrade presents itself)

Turns out it's pretty close to a free upgrade to go to Z170, 6600k and 16GB DDR4. My 2600k is still worth close to $200 on amazon, and the motherboard / ram should be good for $100-150 combined. The real thing that makes the deal is going to hopefully decent ALC1150 from my super crappy ALC8xx, allowing me to sell my USB DAC (another $100+).

Then again, the 6600k with no hyperthreading is a side-grade in a lot of tests next to my 2600k, so I had to make it a 6700k :sneaky: also a good excuse to move to a smaller and quieter micro-atx case from my Antec 300. (silverstone TJ08-E)

All in all, everything included it'll be just over $200 bucks and a bunch of effort selling old stuff. My crappy Z68 board only OCs to 4GHz before causing blue screens so if I can squeeze 4.4GHZ out of the 6700k at the same power and temps, get a new chipset with a lot of nice features compared to Z68, along with a smaller/quieter case with USB 3.0, it'll be worthwhile!

 

[jimbob200521]

Well let's see, over the 15+ years I've been in computers, I've had (from what I remember) upgrades that go about like below. I'm also not counting other systems that weren't upgrades as that list would take all day to type.

IBM 8086 -> 386 -> 486 -> Pentium 133 -> Pentium 2 233 (or possibly 300) -> Celeron 800 -> Pentium 3 1.1 (or 1.3, I'm getting old) -> Pentium 4 1.8 -> Pentium 4 3.0 -> Athlon XP 2800+ -> C2D E6600? -> C2Q Q6600 -> i7 920 -> i7 4820k

So over the course of say 15 years, divided by 15 upgrades (roughly), I've averaged about one upgrade a year. Woah, mind blown hah in reality, those first several years went by with multiple upgrades each year. I think I went from the 8086 to the Celeron 800 in less than 2 years. The later in life I've gotten, the slower the cycle is. Then again, look at how fast things have progressed. Going from a Pentium to a Pentium 2 was a shocker but then going to a Pentium 3 1.1ghz? Woah man, that over 1000 megahertz!! After that, the jump from the C2D to the C2Q wasn't that huge, but going to the i7 from the C2Q was pretty sizable to say the least. The most recent upgrade to the 4820k will show bigger benefits because I also did a big video card upgrade along with it. Oh how the time has flown. Kinda makes me want to think about how much RAM each system had ahaha

 

[gorion]

Slowed, definitely.
Still on Phenom II X6.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I posted in this thread earlier, but I thought I'd throw in an update - still on my rig from 2011, though I have upgraded the graphic card to a 980 Ti. I originally was planning on upgrading to Skylake, then Broadwell E, and now, I think there is a good chance I wait until Skylake E next year. I may even skip that one too. As much as I would love a new PC, I probably won't need to upgrade for awhile unless something dies or I have credit card rewards burning a hole in my pocket that I can spend on the components. Incidentally, that's how I got the core components of this rig - through credit card reward points in 2011.