What compels you to keep upgrading your CPU?

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf

Platinum Member
Jan 5, 2005
2,443
0
0
RussianSensation said:
I upgrade because:

1) I enjoy building and overclocking new systems
2) I never want to be CPU bottlenecked
3) I find that it's cheaper to upgrade more often by "reinvesting" the $ from the sale of old parts into a new system. Option #1 would be to buy a $1,000 system and wait until it is worth practically nothing in 5 years. Option #2 means I spend about $200 / year in upgrades after selling older parts, which amounts to the same $1,000 as Option #1, but I have a fast system during that whole 5-year period.
Click to expand...

3 is stretching it don't ya think? We're talking about a CPU upgrade, not a whole system. Unless you're pissing money away on stuff like Gulftown you shouldn't be anywhere near $1000 for even a platform change (CPU, mobo, & RAM) to get a worthwhile increase in speed. Or maybe the $1000 just hypothetical?
 
Last edited:
james1701

james1701

Golden Member
Sep 14, 2007
1,791
34
91
Crysis made me do it ;).


Patrick Wolf said:
3 is stretching it don't ya think? We're talking about a CPU upgrade, not a whole system. Unless you're pissing money away on stuff like Gulftown you shouldn't be anywhere near $1000 for even a platform change (CPU, mobo, & RAM) to get a worthwhile increase in speed. Or maybe the $1000 just hypothetical?
Click to expand...

I don't know, I got a decent chunk back when I went with a Gulfy. My P45 board died, we had extra money and wifey gave the go ahead. By the time I sold off the old chip, memory, and a graphics card, and what not, that got me down to almost $350.00 off the price of the cpu.

I could not justify going from a Q6600 to a 920, but in my mind I could a Gulftown, and I think I am starting to be rewarded as a gamer. Many newer games can use 6 cores, and many of the ones coming out next has already announced they will use as many cores as you can throw at them. I also do some video encoding, and the 980X is just the beans for that.

I also got lucky and got a pretty good chip. I can do 4.5ghz at 1.4 volts with some tweaking, and the ac turned on. I just don't do anything that requires me to run that hard, other than when benchmarking. I was surprised to see that other than synthetic bench numbers when it came to gaming, these i7 chips are good enough not to need a high over clock to get good fps out of with a good video card. I really have not found anything that justifies the extra cost in electric that needs such an oc to net 7 or 8 fps for everyday use when gaming. But it is nice to have the power there if needed.
 
Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf

Platinum Member
Jan 5, 2005
2,443
0
0
james1701 said:
I could not justify going from a Q6600 to a 920, but in my mind I could a Gulftown, and I think I am starting to be rewarded as a gamer. Many newer games can use 6 cores, and many of the ones coming out next has already announced they will use as many cores as you can throw at them. I also do some video encoding, and the 980X is just the beans for that.
Click to expand...

If they truely use all the cores it's very unlikely you'll see any benefit. Unless some new great feature or game comes out that really stresses the CPU, games will continue to be GPU limited when playing at max eye candy. Games like speed (Mhz) and efficiency, cores are 2nd. But you do video encoding so at least you can get some real benefit from it.

6-core CPU's will be mainstream by the time the next must-have game comes out that actually benefits greatly from it (like how GTAIV loves quads).

Here's a quote from a recent Tom's article.

With rapidly-increasing prices over $200 offering smaller and smaller performance boosts in games, we have a hard time recommending anything more expensive than the Core i5-760. This is especially the case since the Core i5-760 can be overclocked to great effect if more performance is desired, easily surpassing the stock clock rate of the $1,000 Core i7-980X Extreme Edition.
Click to expand...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i3-athlon-ii-x4,2791-5.html
 
james1701

james1701

Golden Member
Sep 14, 2007
1,791
34
91
Game wise, no nothing really stresses it, but it does use some of them up to 40% or so. I am sure most the time, I would be just as happy with a 1090T, as several people in my clan run those. If I was worried about the value of a processor, then I would have bought another socket 775 board and kept running my Q6600. We are just now seeing it become a little dated in new games, but it still chugs right along.
 
mindwreck

mindwreck

Golden Member
May 25, 2003
1,585
1
81
i went from a overclocked s754 sempron to i5 750. fine for the work i did but the single core really started to bogged down even simple multitasking like youtube and surfing. and it couldn't handle high def stuff

also got back into computer gaming and modding so bye bye sempron.
 
RussianSensation

RussianSensation

Elite Member
Sep 5, 2003
19,458
765
126
Patrick Wolf said:
3 is stretching it don't ya think? We're talking about a CPU upgrade, not a whole system. Unless you're pissing money away on stuff like Gulftown you shouldn't be anywhere near $1000 for even a platform change (CPU, mobo, & RAM) to get a worthwhile increase in speed. Or maybe the $1000 just hypothetical?
Click to expand...

Well one day I started off with a $2500 system as my first computer. It had Radeon 8500, XP1600+, 256mb of ram, etc. I kept that until it was worth about nothing (besides the monitor and speakers). I realized this is a financial mismanagement on my part. So I decided I'll buy a "base system" consisting of a case/PSU/monitor/speakers and sound card and keep upgrading the main components in it. With this new strategy I have spent a fraction on PC ownership in the last 5 years.

I'll give you an example. I bought my HD4890 for $200 in August of 2009. I sold it this June 2010 for $165 and bought a GTX470 for $202. So my upgrade cost for the videocard was only $37. Before that I sold my Q6600 @ 3.4ghz, Tuniq Tower, 6GBs of Ram, mobo for $295. I bought my i7+mobo+ram for $470. So my platform upgrade cost was about $175. In aggregate then, my last upgrade of the CPU+Mobo+Ram+GPU cost me about $212 (which is around my $200 budget/year).

Before that, I had to spend $185 to go from E6400 @ 3.4ghz + GeForce 8800GTS to Q6600 + 4890. So again that upgrade was around $200 of my annual budget on the PC.

However, my strategy meant 1 key sacrifice - I don't buy the best videocards on release. I wait at least 6-9 months from release to upgrade to give time for prices to drop. This means sometimes patiently waiting for last generation high-end cards when you find a deal such as $215 HD5870. My strategy would not work if you buy the latest graphics card on release such as a $499 GTX580 and wait 1 year to resell it because you'll probably lose $200 on that card.
 
Last edited:
SorryImLate

SorryImLate

Senior member
Jan 3, 2008
372
0
0
I personally try to use my systems for as long as i can and have no desire to change sockets at the moment but the E8xxx series at 4.2 is not slow by no means.

I've had this socket for 3 years and hope to get another year or so out of it but mines really only used for gaming and surfing the web.
 
BoomerD

BoomerD

No Lifer
Feb 26, 2006
66,300
14,714
146
I haven't upgraded in a L-O-N-G time...my main PC is still running a Socket 478 P4 Northwood...(but it's got Hyper-Threading!!)

I'm way overdue...
 
C

ChippyUK

Member
Jan 13, 2010
99
1
71
I upgrade the CPU every 2-3 years, the reason being is usually there is enough difference in performance to justify it. I play games, therefore the processor needs to keep up with the graphics card at least. 2 generations difference is enough to do it for me...

But yeah, I never upgrade for the 'heck' of it and it's not without research (e.g. to buy when the chip is quite 'new' and not something that'll be out of date in 6 months!).
 
Rubycon

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
17,768
485
126
BoomerD said:
I haven't upgraded in a L-O-N-G time...my main PC is still running a Socket 478 P4 Northwood...(but it's got Hyper-Threading!!)

I'm way overdue...
Click to expand...

I remember Hyper Treading on the P4. Even in hyper mode it just was not enough to keep the northern wood afloat! :biggrin:
 
V

Vic Vega

Diamond Member
Sep 24, 2010
4,535
4
0
Rubycon said:
I remember Hyper Treading on the P4. Even in hyper mode it just was not enough to keep the northern wood afloat! :biggrin:
Click to expand...

My company provided workstation is a 3.4GHz Northwood P4... it's a complete turd. The company I work for replaces their workstations at the five year mark... this bad boy was manufactured in '07 so it looks like we'll be together for quite some time. :)
 
Rubycon

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
17,768
485
126
Vic Vega said:
My company provided workstation is a 3.4GHz Northwood P4... it's a complete turd. The company I work for replaces their workstations at the five year mark... this bad boy was manufactured in '07 so it looks like we'll be together for quite some time. :)
Click to expand...

I have a Dell XPS notebook with that very same CPU and I agree. It chokes even on flash content. I have an FX60 based system from 2006 that's still very usable today in contrast. Netburst was really bad.
 
L

LoneNinja

Senior member
Jan 5, 2009
825
0
0
I still haven't reached 4.0Ghz on an overclock, so I'm compelled to upgrade and try it again.

Current best processor is a Phenom II 940 @ 3.6Ghz.
 
Gillbot

Gillbot

Lifer
Jan 11, 2001
28,830
17
81
I got a little bored today, decided to play some.
1505578.png

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1505578
 
BoomerD

BoomerD

No Lifer
Feb 26, 2006
66,300
14,714
146
Rubycon said:
I remember Hyper Treading on the P4. Even in hyper mode it just was not enough to keep the northern wood afloat! :biggrin:
Click to expand...

Hey...that northern wood might not float well...but it's rock hard!:whiste:
 
Gillbot

Gillbot

Lifer
Jan 11, 2001
28,830
17
81
BoomerD said:
That absolutely makes me sick...


[]http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/screenshot/1506289.png[/IMG]
Click to expand...

Aigo makes me upgrade, ell at him. :whiste:

I think it'll go higher too but I don't have much time to play and push it.
 
C

Chaoticlusts

Member
Jul 25, 2010
162
7
81
I upgraded several years ago to an E6600 when C2D launched (I think I was running a K8 before that :p) still running that same system (sept the motherboard and psu one blew up the other died in a lightning strike) it's only this year that i've been running into real issues with the cpu and the real culprit is multitasking..WoW+HD mkv's at the same time is about the limit of my system..add any extra cpu stress in there and the HD show suddenly becomes unwatchable..which can be a pain in the arse...very much looking forward to grabbing a sandy bridge when it comes out (unless amd's look better round then but we'll see, I'm not bias to either company just whoever has the best product in my price range at the time)

really depending on your usage your right a lot of the time there's very little reason to upgrade a cpu regularly the vast majority of people should be safe skipping a generation or two I'm a hardcore gamer and I'm going from a 65nm cpu to a 32nm one that's quite a few generations of revisions and with my system i'm only just running into games that are struggling with 1920x1200 at high end settings and that's the gpu mainly not the cpu(got the graphics card same time as the cpu 8800gtx at launch)...so generally if your upgrading every generation...unless you've got a lot of money to throw around and want the best, or your managing to fork your old systems off for a very nice price there's not much to be gained

granted there are things you can use a computer for business wise that the time saved from the extra power of the cpu may well pay for itself as people above have mentioned but I can't comment on those I use my computer for a lot but not anything like that

you could also justify it by contributing to folding@home but if your that dedicated to that grab some good CUDA cards or a ps3 get a lot more contribution for your $ than a cpu upgrade :p
 
S

sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
I've never upgraded a CPU (except for once in a MediaSmart server). I get my upgrade when its time for a new machine. Usually when a new socket type arrives on the scene. So for me it's at least new MB + new CPU.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom