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opteron 170 upgrade advice

U

uo7

Senior member
So I currently am running an opteron 170 and it's time to upgrade. I have an intel q9550 and windows 7 disks sitting around unused, but finding a motherboard is difficult. I'm wondering if I'm better off selling the 9550 and buying a 2500k ? Either way I'm looking to build a new system was just wondering what the best bang for the buck would be considering I own the q9550 already.
Budget of around $500 or so depending.
I'm looking to play bf3 guildwars2 when it comes out and some video encoding/editing.

My current setup
Opteron 170
8800gts
2gigs ram
asrock 939 mobo
320 gig wd
Dell 17" 1707FP monitor
 
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for high end gaming you will need to sell all your old stuff and go 2500k, 8gb ram, and better gpu. for video encoding/editing a 2600k may be the better option though. tbh you need a new monitor too as 1280x1024 uses 5:4 aspect ratio which is horrible for gaming.
 
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Wow, I went from an fx55 to an opteron 180 to e6750 to q9450 to i7 920 just in my main rig in the past 4 years. I've also got a q6600 at mom's house and 1055t lying around that I still use sporadically. Either you show remarkable restraint, or I need help with my upgrade addiction! 😉
 
You'll be able to get $100 easy for your current rig, and $150 minimally for the Q9550. That's $750 for your new system. Without needing to buy W7, ~$500 on the system itself and ~$250 on your display would be wise.

FWIW neither BF3 nor GW2 will be particularly demanding games, hardware-wise. A 2500K will be overkill for both. That said, think about how much and what kind of video editing you'll be doing. If it's a lot of more demanding editing, you'll want to spring for a 2500K. If it's not, get an i3-2100 and spend more money on your display and GPU.

TBH you've been using the Opty long enough...wait another month or two and see what AMD's new Bulldozer CPUs bring. Might be a better option than a 2500K, or it might very well knock the 2500K down in price.
 
and if he saves 100 bucks now by going with a 2100 instead of 2500k then he will be upgrading again even sooner. the 2500k has way way more staying power with its four real cores an ability to oc.
 
ya that opteron served well past it's purpose 🙂

I do have windows 7 64 bit to install in a new machine.
used for gaming and light encoding.
the $500 was just an estimate for a mobo cpu vidcard.
I already bought memory G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 from the newegg sale. Thought I had that typed in above guess I didn't


So looks like I'll be selling the q9550 And picking up a 2500k sucks fry's was out of stock last week on that sale for $149.00

Looks like I will be picking up a new monitor next month.
 
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Thanks everyone for the advice 🙂 Haha toyota

I'll sniff around the forums figuring out a motherboard for light oc and vidcard now.

happy medium it looks like I will be going the 2500k route. Thanks though.
 
uo7 said:
Thanks everyone for the advice 🙂 Haha toyota

I'll sniff around the forums figuring out a motherboard for light oc and vidcard now.

happy medium it looks like I will be going the 2500k route. Thanks though.
Click to expand...

You won't be disappointed. I went from an Opty 160 (or maybe 165, I really don't remember) to a 2600K. It's an amazing jump!
 
Good decision, not worth to spend the money building a new Socket LGA775 system using your existing Q9550.

That Q9550 will still fetch a decent value on eBay ($150+), much more than its performance dictates.
 
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