Who's struggling to justify upgrading their CPU?

[jsedlak]

Have 775.
Do not want SB. It may be faster than my current machine, but I need more RAM head room, and more channels.

So I am waiting for 2011.

 

[hclarkjr]

oh i am pissed i did not get it, you misunderstand my statement. Intel should have done better testing before releasing that chipset and i hope they burn in hell for what they did!! i did not want to wait the 3-4 months that it is going to take for them to get new chipset out. and who knows what other problems are hiding ready to jump and bite them on the ass. i will let other people beta test the new boards then maybe get one later on or just get the 6 core chip that will run on my new UD5 i bought for the 930.

 

[Zap]

I don't let my conscience have anything to do with my upgrade choices.

 

[Cebu]

There aren't any good upgrade options from a Phenom II 955 at the moment. Would love to have a 2500K but the performance delta isn't quite enough to warrant ~$300 for a new mobo + CPU, so I'm holding out for the next generation for now.

I had a 955BE and the performance difference between it and my new 2600K is amazing. The difference when encoding is massive. The 955BE would struggle to keep up when I would be encoding and performing other task at the same time, whereas, the 2600K just chews through it reckless abandon. My system was always locking up for 5 or 10 seconds during encoding and I thought it was the lack of ram or Windows 7 but after I upgraded my CPU and MB the same system doesn't even flinch. It is so smooth that I forget I am encoding until it is finished. Hyperthreading makes all of the difference in the world.

 

[coffeejunkee]

oh i am pissed i did not get it, you misunderstand my statement. Intel should have done better testing before releasing that chipset and i hope they burn in hell for what they did!! i did not want to wait the 3-4 months that it is going to take for them to get new chipset out. and who knows what other problems are hiding ready to jump and bite them on the ass. i will let other people beta test the new boards then maybe get one later on or just get the 6 core chip that will run on my new UD5 i bought for the 930.

Ok now I can understand where you're coming from. Although over here, some shops still sell 'old' P67 boards and will just let you swap it when the new revision comes out. Me personally, I have faith in Intel fixing the chipset and am not afraid of platform immaturity. SBR and especially the mobo's aren't that different from 1156.

 

[LoneNinja]

I can't justify replacing my Phenom 9850 yet, even when all I need to do is buy a new Phenom II X4/X6 and drop it into the board. Part of it may be that I already have more powerful machines, but honestly a 9850 can still do everything I need my PC to do.

 

[P4man]

Me.
~$ uptime
19:51:57 up 3:28, 3 users, load average: 0.19, 0.26, 0.26

I replaced my C2D with a C2Q 6600 just because I could do it for free. I overclocked it to 3.3 GHz just because I could. Is there any benefit for me over my old 2.1 GHz C2D? Not really.

Now when Cliffs of Dover get released I might consider an upgrade if my PC cant handle it. But since Ive played its predecessor (IL-2 sturmovik) for 10 years, that might be my last upgrade for another 10 years.

 

[Rubycon]

For my single socket system it's pretty hard to upgrade from this:

Not impressed with the 990X samples they had. As a matter of fact I never saw them - told them to sell them off. D:

 

[Yuriman]

I built my system in early 2007:

Q6600 @ 3ghz, watercooled
2x HD3850
2x 80GB Hitachi's in Raid0 (from older build)
Fortron 500w
BenQ FP241w (slightly earlier)


I swapped out the 2x 3850's for a 4870, which wasn't really a performance improvement, but I dropped a waterblock on it and my system got quieter. I swapped the 2x 80gb spindle drives in RAID with 2x 80GB SSDs in RAID, and put a beefier PSU in. Other than the SSDs, my system performs exactly the same as it did in 2007, and I'm quite happy with it. My motherboard is getting a little flakey, and it if craps out I'm going to have a hard time deciding between a cheap replacement and stretching it for another refresh or 2, and sandybridge.

 

[toyota]

Yuriman, you must not play many modern games with 2 80gb hard drives. just the OS and about 12-15 games would wipe out that capacity never mind putting anything else on there.

 

[Yuriman]

Deadspace 2, EVE, Starcraft 2, WoW, L4D2, BFBC2, TF2, Civ5, and a few other random steam games installed. After other random junk, I have about 30gb free... and I can probably remove some of the games I have installed, since I don't really play 12-15 games at the same time.

 

[Sephire]

Intlel's Q6600 is a beast. For 18 months it was my main rig.

 

[Yuriman]

Intlel's Q6600 is a beast. For 18 months it was my main rig.

Going on 4 years! Probably my best hardware purchase, ever.

 

[toyota]

Deadspace 2, EVE, WoW, L4D2, BFBC2, TF2, Civ5, and a few other random steam games installed. After other random junk, I have about 30gb free... and I can probably remove some of the games I have installed, since I don't really play 12-15 games at the same time.

I go back and play around in some games and also run benchmarks. my Steam folder alone is 194 gb with just 27 of my games currently installed. and many of those are older games that take up hardly any space. heck just GTA 4 with Liberty City alone is 32 gb. even 4 years ago when I had 320gb, twice as much hard drive space as you, I was still having to delete stuff weekly.

 

[Yuriman]

When I'm not actively playing WoW or EVE, and sometimes other games, I'll often move the install folder to a spindle drive.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

that is only part of it. if your cpu is not really sufficient for the game itself then a higher res will not change that. for example if a game is calculating many things on the cpu then it could mean low minimums and even low averages no matter what resolution.

yes it would. Bottleneck is not the cpu getting strained under the workload. Cmon games are single threaded uses one or 2 cores. The problem start the GPU starts running away from it and have to wait for the cpu. At lower resolutions the gpu dont have much work to do so it will obviously run away from it. Give it more work to do up the resolutions and you will note theres little performance difference in a expensive cpu and a budget cpu in gaming. The x4 can pull a 5970 without any problems as well and trade blows with the I7 920. But at lower resolutions its getting a hiding from the I7. Higher the resolution go the smaller the gap inb performance difference till you get at 1080p where its almost non exsistant

 

[toyota]

yes it would. Bottleneck is not the cpu getting strained under the workload. Cmon games are single threaded uses one or 2 cores. Yhe problem start the GPU running away from it and have to wait for the cpu. At lower resolutions the gpu dont have much work to do so it will obviously run away from it. Give it more work to do up the resolutions and you will note theres little performance difference in a expensive cpu and a budget cpu in gaming. The x4 can pull a 5970 without any problems as well and trade blows with the I7 920. But at lower resolutions its getting a hiding from the I7. Higher the resolution go the smaller the gap inb performance difference till you get at 1080p where its almost non exsistant

again that is only PART of it. my E8500 can only deliver so much performance so in a cpu intensive game such as GTA 4 or Ghostbusters it is quite slow at times. a higher resolution does not change that fact.

 

[deimos3428]

I had a 955BE and the performance difference between it and my new 2600K is amazing. The difference when encoding is massive. The 955BE would struggle to keep up when I would be encoding and performing other task at the same time, whereas, the 2600K just chews through it reckless abandon. My system was always locking up for 5 or 10 seconds during encoding and I thought it was the lack of ram or Windows 7 but after I upgraded my CPU and MB the same system doesn't even flinch. It is so smooth that I forget I am encoding until it is finished. Hyperthreading makes all of the difference in the world.

Of course it's faster, there's no doubt about that. But in my opinion none of the currently available options are $300-400 faster, including SB. (Maybe IB or Bulldozer, we'll see.)

 

[samboy]

I think the key point is that CPU performance improvement rate has really slowed down in the last 10 years.

Around the turn of the century we saw a double of performance every couple of years driven by the increased clock speed.......... then this stopped.

Now we get more cores and IPC improvements. Still helpful, but slower progress and how helpful depends on the use/application. The old days of 2x clock speed helped everything.

Intel is still releasing CPU's at the same rate as before and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Although people, like myself, no longer jump on every new processor release the market is bigger than what it used to be so Intel can profitably keep the release cycle as is.

Whether you buy the Sandy Bridge or not probably depends on what your current CPU is (or you may be the rare type who has money and likes to try everything released!). I go by the old mantra of upgrading when you see a 2x improvement in performance. Everyone has different criterion and there is no "right" way here.

For me, going from an E6700@3.2GHZ to 2600K@4.5GHZ is almost exactly double the performance (and an additional two cores). The i920 etc was tempting but I tested a friends system and it was somewhere between 50-70% depending on overclocking luck. As tempting as it was, it fell short of my 2x metric.

If I had anything better than the E6700 then I probably would have skipped the initial Sandy Bridge launch. If the trend continues, I probably won't be upgrading again for another 5 years (E6700 lasted 4.5).

What is interesting is the incorporation of the GPU. If Intel can ever catchup to AMD/Nvidia then this may change the whole CPU upgrade game. Instead of buying a new discrete CPU you will get a new CPU from Intel (CPU performance may not even be better). Moore's law is still in place and the GPU is a great thing to use all those extra transistors on...... Intel has access to the latest fabrication and this will give them the advantage. That said, Intel has not demonstrated any capability of matching AMD/NVidia in the last decade so it may all be wishful thinking on Intel's part (and a lot of patents in the way)

 

[MegaWorks]

I was planning to build a server with a friend so I bought 2 x AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours with 32GB of ECC Ram, but then decided not to do it! Now I have 16 cores sitting in my closet waiting to be raped, I might use it to upgrade from my Phenom II X6 video editing rig.

 

[Artista]

I hear you but I think I can justify a upgrade. :biggrin: Sort of anyway.

My rig:
AMD 64 x2 3800+ (2.0Ghz)
Nvidia 8800GT
160Gb SATA harddrive

I run older games and am now playing Borderlands. It plays ok and nothing slow that I notice except after I "teleport" into the game I see the grass still being rendered. Not sure what to make of it but the car drives well and during the intense fight scenes it doesn't slow down at all.

The crazy thing is on all the review sites it's all about FPS with games. I mean really why do we need a rig that plays most things at 200 FPS when 60 or 70 plays just as well? Seems like that is all it is about, FPS, quality be damned anymore.

In the end its all about want vs need and in todays world/society that is a psychological can of worms I dont want to open here!

 

[Cerb]

Not struggling at all. IMO, 1155 is just too expensive, and given 1155's performance and cost, 1156 is too expensive for what it offers. Meanwhile, 775 CPU upgrades, even going used with eBay, are fairly expensive, as there seems to be a high demand for quad upgrade CPUs.

I'll wait, and hope BD can drive down prices. There's plenty of performance to be had, but I don't see the value is spending nearly the cost of a car on a PC upgrade.

 

[toyota]

Not struggling at all. IMO, 1155 is just too expensive, and given 1155's performance and cost, 1156 is too expensive for what it offers. Meanwhile, 775 CPU upgrades, even going used with eBay, are fairly expensive, as there seems to be a high demand for quad upgrade CPUs.

I'll wait, and hope BD can drive down prices. There's plenty of performance to be had, but I don't see the value is spending nearly the cost of a car on a PC upgrade.

2500k, mobo and 4gb ram are around 450 bucks. where do you live that 450 bucks buys a car?

 

[BoomerD]

Not struggling at all. IMO, 1155 is just too expensive, and given 1155's performance and cost, 1156 is too expensive for what it offers. Meanwhile, 775 CPU upgrades, even going used with eBay, are fairly expensive, as there seems to be a high demand for quad upgrade CPUs.

I'll wait, and hope BD can drive down prices. There's plenty of performance to be had, but I don't see the value is spending nearly the cost of a car on a PC upgrade.

You must drive crappy cars...My newest one had a sticker price of $53,000...and that was almost 6 years ago.
The 1156 stuff isn't "too expensive for what it offers," although the 1155 line DOES offer a bit more performance...for a slightly higher price.
If you're waiting for "Bulldozer," you must be strictly an AMD fanboy...and while there's not really anything wrong with preferring one over the other, (I prefer Intel, but bought my wife a Dell with an Athlon processor) you MAY be waiting a while...and at this time, there's no knowing if you're going to get more from Bulldozer than the 1155 line offers. (only rumors so far)

 

[Artista]

If you're waiting for "Bulldozer," you must be strictly an AMD fanboy...

I do not think waiting for the next biggest thing makes a fan boy either way. Perhaps he means:

"I want to wait until Bulldozer comes out, and hope that prices drop on the Sandy Bridge setup, as well as downward pressure lowering prices on all other CPU before making my buying decision."

Heck I waited before buying one of the newer mid range graphics cards and am glad I did. The prices have been dropping like a rock and are crazy low compared to when they came out.

Now only if the prices on the CPU would drop the same!

Save a buck where you can!