Hi i'm looking for some advice on a new build. I have a machine i built in 2011 that's running some gigabyte motherboard and a i7 970 at 3.2 ghz with 20 gb ram (it would have been 24 but one of the slots is bad). Graphics card is a gtx 680 and i have a samsung 1 tb SSD drive that has both the os and my data on it and is much larger than i need. I just backup offsite or use an external hdd for videos and music and stuff.
I use the machine primarily for development under linux- lots of compiling and testing code. The 6 cores are very nice to have for this as is the ssd. Graphics i don't care about too much - i have a gtx 680 and it can drive my 3 monitors under linux which is all i need. I do some gpu programming for clients but i just rent machines on amazon ec2 for that stuff.
My machine has been very very stable which is nice since if it breaks i don't make any money. But now i'd like to upgrade to something with as much ram as possible- more and more VMs are looking like the way to go to isolate my environments.
I was thinking 64gb. But it seems haswell can only handle 32gb on most boards. So it seems that i'd need to go to a Ivy Bridge E based solution to get a board that can handle 64gb ram. But a lot of forum comments seem to think that the ivy bridge E is very niche and not going to see a lot of improvements compared to the Haswell platform.
Xeons are really expensive so i'd like to not go that route although the ECC ram is very tempting.
I think i'll upgrade if i can see a 30% or better performance upgrade on my workload while keeping the stability of my current system. I really don't want to overclock if that will compromise the stability of the system.
Do you guys think i'll be able to see this sort of improvement going to the i7-4960x from a 970 ? And any thoughts on future expandability ? I'd like this new system to be viable for another 3-4 years.
thanks for reading
I use the machine primarily for development under linux- lots of compiling and testing code. The 6 cores are very nice to have for this as is the ssd. Graphics i don't care about too much - i have a gtx 680 and it can drive my 3 monitors under linux which is all i need. I do some gpu programming for clients but i just rent machines on amazon ec2 for that stuff.
My machine has been very very stable which is nice since if it breaks i don't make any money. But now i'd like to upgrade to something with as much ram as possible- more and more VMs are looking like the way to go to isolate my environments.
I was thinking 64gb. But it seems haswell can only handle 32gb on most boards. So it seems that i'd need to go to a Ivy Bridge E based solution to get a board that can handle 64gb ram. But a lot of forum comments seem to think that the ivy bridge E is very niche and not going to see a lot of improvements compared to the Haswell platform.
Xeons are really expensive so i'd like to not go that route although the ECC ram is very tempting.
I think i'll upgrade if i can see a 30% or better performance upgrade on my workload while keeping the stability of my current system. I really don't want to overclock if that will compromise the stability of the system.
Do you guys think i'll be able to see this sort of improvement going to the i7-4960x from a 970 ? And any thoughts on future expandability ? I'd like this new system to be viable for another 3-4 years.
thanks for reading
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