To upgrade, or not to upgrade?

[Kartajan]

thinking of purchasing the following for about $360:

ASUS P8H67-M EVO (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel H67 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX
Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Intel Core i5-2300 Sandy Bridge 2.8GHz (3.1GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W

The P8H67 and socket 1155 would upgrade my main PC,
currently an i5-750 LGA 1156, in a P7H55-M PRO, running a 128G m4, HD5770, and 8G DDR3 1333

the 60G m4 would go to the wife's machine (LGA1156 i3, in an ECS MS200 (H55 chipset booksize)

would the performance increase be noticeable? I expect a minimal improvement due to the CPU, and another due to the controller link to my SSD going from SATA2 to SATA3

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. HTPC, Moderate gaming (Civ5, UT3).
2. What YOUR budget is. $360
3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from. USA
4. IF YOU have a brand preference. Not really; lean ASUS/Intel
5. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are. see above
7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds. DEFAULT
8. What resolution will you be using? 1920*1080
9. WHEN do you plan to build it? Anytime
X. Do you need to purchase any software to go with the system, such as Windows or Blu Ray playback software? N/A

 

[lehtv]

Going from i5-750 to i5-2400 is a very small upgrade, definitely recommend against that. I can't really recommend any CPU upgrade for the intended uses of the PC. Your CPU handles HTPC use and moderate gaming more than well enough.

As a side note - if you wanted more performance and needed it too, you'd benefit from an unlocked Ivy Bridge i5-3570K, overclocked. The whole package with an aftermarket cooler and a motherboard would cost about $350-400. But you said you wanted to run default speeds, so that'd be out, I guess.

If you want to double your HTPC as a more enthusiast gaming platform, you should spend the cash on a faster video card like 7850. But only if you actually play games that your current card doesn't handle.

 

[Puppies04]

Not trying to go OT but....

Why not overclock the 750 It will end up faster than the 2300 and I doubt you are going to notice much going from sata 2 - sata 3 in anything you do.

 

[Kartajan]

I was kind of thinking the difference would be a bit bigger from the interface change, but comments are noted. I guess whenever the 7 series chipsets become available I will look again.

(I actually think the biggest change whenever I next upgrade will end up to be in the wife's machine from going HDD-> SSD)

 

[mfenn]

The most important thing you get from an SSD is a high number of random IO operations per second (IOPS). IOPS don't really change significantly between SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s. What does change is the throughput when doing sequential reads and writes such as copying large files around. However, I doubt that you really run into that use case very much.

As lehtv noted, the CPU change would pretty much be a side-grade.