Will I ever upgrade my 2500k

[KingFatty]

There has to be some killer feature that everyone wants in their game, but totally destroys CPUs.

So far it seems all the really good stuff is GPU-bound, so nobody cares about the poor old CPU. But what would such a killer feature be?

Is there any feature that needs fast CPU, that everyone would want in a game, but has been set aside right now because it's too computationally expensive for existing CPUs? Everything that comes to mind off the top of my head is for GPU.

 

[Deders]

If DirectX 12 is all it promises to be I don't think I'll need to upgrade for a few years yet.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

So far it seems all the really good stuff is GPU-bound, so nobody cares about the poor old CPU. But what would such a killer feature be?

It depends on the game, and there's a drop off point where "good enough" becomes "OMFG."

I thought my Q6600 was pretty spiffy until Civilization V came out, and it was just. CPU. intensive. enough. to. make. gameplay. annoying. Heck, I recycled my GPU in my new system and it was still night-and-day-awesome.

The 3570k, incidentally, quintupled my Handbrake encodes and got me DDR3 and SATA3, so platform upgrades have their advantages.

 

[Charlie98]

I'm still rocking the 2500K, but only at 4.1GHz... that seems to be my chip's tipping point for stability and heat. I don't really want for more processing power. I did swap my old GTX560Ti 448 into a new Pentium build and dropped in a GTX760SC to carry the 2500K a little further.

The only thing that made me consider upgrading earlier on was getting a USB 3.0 header for my front USB 3.0 case ports. I installed an adapter card that borked up my SATA driver, so I'm back to nothing. In reality, I couldn't justify the cost of a Z77 board just to upgrade to USB 3.0... it's a matter of convenience, anyway.

I'd rather upgrade a 256GB SSD to 512GB-1TB or even get a new keyboard & mouse / comfy chair (most important component of all!) than a +5-10% CPU perf which doesn't even feel any different in most games.

That's kind of where I'm at. Besides building a new lower-powered PC for a spare, I've upgraded storage in all my computers. They all have SSDs now and I don't have a HDD smaller than 1TB in any of my boxes. Next on the list is upgrading my portable drives...

 

[Vinwiesel]

A lot of us in this boat. I ran my 2500k at 4.1 for a while, but finally played around a little more and got 4.5 stable. But 4.3 on my system is the sweet spot for remaining quiet with reasonable temps.

So far I see no reason to upgrade. My GTX570 is getting a bit old though, so I'm hoping my PCIE 2.0 slot is still adequate for a newer card.

I replaced my HTPC with a Pentium G3258 which does great, and is low powered/silent. That satisfied my upgrade itch for now, and for only $100.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

4790K on Z97 doesn't impress me as much since it feels like a mild upgrade over 4770K OC. If you waited this long to upgrade, might as well go 6-core or wait for another year for something even better if your CPU doesn't feel slow. I don't see a lot of value in upgrading for the sake of upgrading. I mean even dual 880s would be a better upgrade for games.

If the opportunity affords itself, you could upgrade to HT too. A Xeon E3 1275V2 for $150 made a nice upgrade from my office rig's 3570K (4.4GHz OC).

 

[nyker96]

well my 2500k isn't even getting used more than 10-15% nowadays.

 

[MongGrel]

Some of use are still putting along on 6 or 7 year old systems on X5650's etc at around 4.5 and above.



:whiste:

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Some of use are still putting along on 6 or 7 year old systems on X5650's etc at around 4.5 and above.

Sold off my Gigabyte EX58-UD3Rs, ASUS P6T DV2 and P6X58D-E. X58 mobos are worth their weight in gold these days

That's a comparison worth noting. Many of the posters here are sporting "K" chips, and the OC'ability of the SB-Ks was almost a presupposition. Comparing the non-K chips would seem easy to overlook.

The 3770 / E3 1275V2 is especially attractive, since they can turbo+4 OC to 4.1GHz (full) / 4.3GHz (single), which is close to the limit of IvyBridge without delidding anyway (my previous 3570Ks couldn't get higher than 4.4GHz without an immense bump in Vcore).

 

[Xpage]

I never upgrade that quickly, i like to wait until I am tired of poor performance in games before i upgrade. I don't game much anymore so I have no desire to upgrade. Though some tech does make it worthwhile, SSDs i jumped into early on (worth it), UEFI is nice for faster boot times, etc.

I expect my next major upgrade will be for PCIe SSD support and probably a new SSD to go with it. Been tempted to ditch the full case (50+lbs) and watercooling gear to something smaller but I do like playing with things, so I will probably keep it.

 

[jpeyton]

I was going strong on my Sandy Bridge quad for a while, but some dude wanted to unload his factory HP Haswell quad system for under $250...couldn't refuse. The desktop market is very soft, and Intel/AMD know it. I applaud them (Intel especially) for continuing to push forward on desktop processors even though all the growth is in mobile these days.

 

[ohforfs]

I wonder if anyone can theorise on Skylake for us, given what we know? I have read what I can, but what I see is just optimizations in the pipeline, the same 4 cores and no mention of clock speeds, though one would assume it will be 4.6GHz on the K part as that seems to be where they are running into a wall?

 

[davie jambo]

Awesome chip. I've got mine at 4.1ghz , paired with a R9 280x and 8gb RAM

Runs everything at the highest settings

 

[meloz]

I wonder if anyone can theorise on Skylake for us, given what we know? I have read what I can, but what I see is just optimizations in the pipeline, the same 4 cores and no mention of clock speeds, though one would assume it will be 4.6GHz on the K part as that seems to be where they are running into a wall?

The way I sees it most performance improvement these days are coming from hardware extensions (TSX, ADX, AVX2, AVX 512/3.2 etc), and thus software must be compiled towards specific arch to take advantage of these improvements.

Since most software is compiled for AMD64/x86-64 -and likely will be for another decade or more unless Intel get supportive- I expect Skylake to be at best 3-5% improvement in single-threaded performance on CPU side. Performance/watt should be splendid, however, as should the idle power usage. iGPU should also take another 25 % leap, for those who care.

So a decent upgrade for Sandy and Ivy Bridge users, but guys with Haswell and Broadwell might find it difficult to cost justify their upgrade.

Seems these days we have to wait four generations before upgrading to get enough bang for buck. Sans extensions, single-threaded performance is just not increasing enough to make a measurabe difference in real-world computing.

This should be a warning bell for Intel, most of us are 'power users' who look for any reason to upgrade. If we are happy waiting four or more years to upgrade, what to say of common users. They could go by a decade or more, as long as neglect does not kill their PC. I expect another gradual dip in PC sales (desktop+notebook) in the coming 24 months. The dip could become a crash if the developing economies take a hit from some international currency event.

Two ways Intel could counter this slowdown and any (potential) revenue hit: either give greater and greater performance/$ with each generation to keep users enthralled and upgrading, or slow down their product cycle and milk the market. Suppose they already made their choice quiet some years ago.

 

[Rebel44]

I am in the same boat as OP. I like idea of upgrading my current rig, but no reason to do it and HW that would be worth the upgrade is absurdly expensive.

Looks like i will instead save that money for my next car.

 

[jpiniero]

I expect another gradual dip in PC sales (desktop+notebook) in the coming 24 months.

PC sales to consumers continues to slide; Intel's increase in sales came due to corporate users who bought new Windows 7 machines due to XP's extended support ending.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Plenty of games could use faster per core performance, but the upgrade from overclocked 2500K to overclocked haswell is marginal.

The only thing that's really increased with the last couple of chip generations is intels profit margin.

 

[Puppies04]

i won't be upgrading my 2500K out of neccesity until a game comes out that needs 6 cores. Looking at the compute power on the "new" consoles that won't be for a while.

As for getting the itch I like thelook of the new 8 cores that are coming out so I might get one of those just for Epeen scenarios.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The desktop market is very soft

Tell me about it.

My local Staples had a couple of desktop rigs (specs unknown) for ~$250 and ~$270 ea, and there was a $100 off clearance computers last week. So someone could have picked up a (probably pentium, or A4) desktop for ~$150 + tax.

But nobody did.

I was the sucker that picked up a Sandy Bridge i3 3.4Ghz rig with 4GB / 1TB, for a similar cost, last time those coupons came around, and I still haven't managed to unload it. I was offering it to several people for $200.

Windows 8 is part of the slump too, I'm sure.

 

[Charlie98]

This should be a warning bell for Intel, most of us are 'power users' who look for any reason to upgrade. If we are happy waiting four or more years to upgrade, what to say of common users. They could go by a decade or more, as long as neglect does not kill their PC. I expect another gradual dip in PC sales (desktop+notebook) in the coming 24 months. The dip could become a crash if the developing economies take a hit from some international currency event.

I think that's why Intel released an OC-able Pentium chip... just to keep the market interested and active. If Intel doesn't sell new chips/chipsets, mobo manufacturers don't sell mobos.

Windows 8 is part of the slump too, I'm sure.

I really wonder about that... how much the bad press of W8 has affected PC sales.

 

[poohbear]

Well what about these i7 users that are saying their BF4 MP matches stopped stuttering & their minimum FPS increased when they upgraded to an 8 threaded CPU? BF4 uses the popular Frostbite 3 engine that's also being used in all of EA's future AAA games, ie Dragon Age 3, Mass Effect 4, and others.

So if an i7 with HT is reducing stuttering and minimum FPS for these users in a popular game engine, and then on top of that burns through video editing and encoding programs, isn't that reason enough to upgrade for power users?

 

[Ketchup]

I am very happy with the performance of my 2500k, and it will be a great replacement for the old Athlon X2 in my file/media server.

 

[mkmitch]

I don't see upgrading from my 2500k any time soon and that's a good thing.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Well what about these i7 users that are saying their BF4 MP matches stopped stuttering & their minimum FPS increased when they upgraded to an 8 threaded CPU? BF4 uses the popular Frostbite 3 engine that's also being used in all of EA's future AAA games, ie Dragon Age 3, Mass Effect 4, and others.

Most people won't see a difference because some people sacrifice performance for a bit more eye candy. The i7 only makes a difference if you run settings that pump out a higher framerate at least in BF4 or a rig with a beefy gpu configuration.

Those gamegpu charts that fly about with those cpu numbers are about spot on from my experience.

 

[Bradtech519]

I'm in the same boat on my FX 8350. I'm actually about to buy my first SSD on my desktop, and possibly will get a new video card beyond my GTX 580. Only thing I'm really doing with Distributed Computing, and World of Warcraft. WoW loves the Intel CPUs, and better IPC per core. My FX 8350 though pulls enough FPS for me though. I expect my next desktop CPU to be an Intel CPU as AMD seems to be done with competing at the high end market.