Who's struggling to justify upgrading their CPU?

[BonzaiDuck]

as I mentioned earlier my MSI board and 2500k were only $325 up front and will be $305 after MIR. my board certainly appears to be a pretty good board with many features.

I used to buy cheaper to midrange parts. In the 1990's $40 PSUs and InWin cases. The enthusiast "bug" got me by the wallet in the last decade. After building some budget PCs to upgrade the fam-damn-ily, I tried to scale down my ambitions this time around. Those builds reminded me you could do something worthwhile for less, but a mainstreamer machine is a . . . mainstreamer machine.

Even so, I wanted fewer hard disks, less power consumption, a compensating backup solution, more memory and the most speed I could wring out of a standup motherboard without buying the Maximus IV Extreme-Z or that "Classified" X58 model of the last couple years. And I passed up the 1366'ers because I decided to wait. Last year, I was even contemplating the possibility of getting the hex-core 970X(?) I even thought about the flag-ship hex-core.

Even this Sandy Bridge build on a mid-priced ASUS motherboard -- it's turned out to be shameless chocolate drolling down my chin and onto my shirt. I refuse to feel guilty, but I just took a closer look at my Q6600 system [the motherboard I've learnd to hate] and discovered the real load temperatures I have during this summer heatwave using monitor software that was revised some time ago to correct the B3-stepping's TJunction spec.

Ran the "lotsa-heat" Large-FFT's PRIME95 last night with room ambient 78F. Nothing stellar, but that Q6600 was OC'd to the sure-thing level of 3.0 Ghz. For the load temperatures, they barely get above 50C. Maybe one of the four cores.

But back to the new machine [and boy, is my brother going to be lucky for the Kentsfield]. Once I saw all the new features, I just went over-budget, bought an unplanned SSD. Then I saw a "deal" for the top-end VelociRaptor at about $198 with $8 shipping, and grabbed that, too . . . . .

My wine and steak budget is frozen for a month. Frozen steaks, or the stockpile of vino that's taken me a year or more to build up . . . .

 

[Snakecharmed]

I basically build and forget for a long time. Lots of things happened between 2008 and now that probably kept me from building a new computer as I probably otherwise would have though. Still, needless to say, going from an Athlon XP to an i5-2500K is incomparable. The former couldn't even play 720p video smoothly and stuttered and pegged the CPU at 100% on 1080p. The latter...well, it's great, but let's say I would enjoy the experience more if I can successfully troubleshoot and find a resolution over the next couple of days to the Gigabyte boot loop and the inability to run 4x4GB RAM.

 

[gramboh]

I used to buy cheaper to midrange parts. In the 1990's $40 PSUs and InWin cases. The enthusiast "bug" got me by the wallet in the last decade. After building some budget PCs to upgrade the fam-damn-ily, I tried to scale down my ambitions this time around. Those builds reminded me you could do something worthwhile for less, but a mainstreamer machine is a . . . mainstreamer machine.

Even so, I wanted fewer hard disks, less power consumption, a compensating backup solution, more memory and the most speed I could wring out of a standup motherboard without buying the Maximus IV Extreme-Z or that "Classified" X58 model of the last couple years. And I passed up the 1366'ers because I decided to wait. Last year, I was even contemplating the possibility of getting the hex-core 970X(?) I even thought about the flag-ship hex-core.

Even this Sandy Bridge build on a mid-priced ASUS motherboard -- it's turned out to be shameless chocolate drolling down my chin and onto my shirt. I refuse to feel guilty, but I just took a closer look at my Q6600 system [the motherboard I've learnd to hate] and discovered the real load temperatures I have during this summer heatwave using monitor software that was revised some time ago to correct the B3-stepping's TJunction spec.

Ran the "lotsa-heat" Large-FFT's PRIME95 last night with room ambient 78F. Nothing stellar, but that Q6600 was OC'd to the sure-thing level of 3.0 Ghz. For the load temperatures, they barely get above 50C. Maybe one of the four cores.

But back to the new machine [and boy, is my brother going to be lucky for the Kentsfield]. Once I saw all the new features, I just went over-budget, bought an unplanned SSD. Then I saw a "deal" for the top-end VelociRaptor at about $198 with $8 shipping, and grabbed that, too . . . . .

My wine and steak budget is frozen for a month. Frozen steaks, or the stockpile of vino that's taken me a year or more to build up . . . .

Why am I picturing you as having a large beard and telling young children stories of the 8088 days with 7MHz clock frequencies on turbo mode. No offense intended .

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Why am I picturing you as having a large beard and telling young children stories of the 8088 days with 7MHz clock frequencies on turbo mode. No offense intended .

HA!! A senior family member only this evening remarked that my beard had suddenly turned so white, they couldn't understand how it could be so -- being another 22 years older than I without "white hair."

On the stories, I have plenty to tell -- "war stories" in a large organization from before the Zilog Z80, the IBM PC, Compaq and Osborne transportables, and a new wave of computer application where there had been none before. But maybe some of that belongs in the "political" forum. Or, maybe, all of it. Perhaps, though, I can instead recommend a book by an organizational psychologist named Douglas LaBier -- "Modern Madness: The Hidden Link Between Work and Emotional Conflict," first published between 1987 and 1989. Or for a more positive note, I and my colleagues got a "thumbs up" in "Out of Crisis," by William Edwards Deming.