i7 upgrade advice

garylouden · 26 May 2009 at 13:15

Hello

As you can see my current spec is no slouch but recently my CPU has been playing up and cant seem to keep the same overclock I have had for over a 2 years. I am down to 3.2ghz now and its no problem but a little worrying. Along with this my big TT armour case is getting very annoying, it pulls dust in like there is no tomorrow and there is a rattle somewhere that's driving me crazy.

So I thought why not just buy a new pc. I was thinking something along the lines of.

What sort of performance increase do you think i would receive from this upgrade? Also if anyone owns something similar how quiet would this be?

spitzoid · 26 May 2009 at 13:17

I think you'll definitely see an improvement in terms of multi-tasking and general "snappiness" of performance based on the i7/DDR3 factor. Can't comment on the quietness side of things though because I haven't had any experience with the case.

mp260767 · 26 May 2009 at 14:00

maybe change the psu to the coolermaster 620w or a be quiet unit.

memory maybe go for some 12800/10666.

other option for a cooler is the Titan TTC-NK85TZ Fenrir, not sure out quiet it is compared to the noctua, could always swap the fan for the noctua vortex if its not too your liking.

garylouden · 26 May 2009 at 14:22

mp260767 said:
maybe change the psu to the coolermaster 620w or a be quiet unit.

memory maybe go for some 12800/10666.

other option for a cooler is the Titan TTC-NK85TZ Fenrir, not sure out quiet it is compared to the noctua, could always swap the fan for the noctua vortex if its not too your liking.

Well my thinking behind the 750 is in case I ever add another GTX280. I'm not sure this will ever happen so might knock it down a bit.

The ram will give me room for a nice overclock, I will aim for 3.8ghz so should stop me from using a multiplier.

The Fenrir is a lot cheaper but its noisy, once I add the fans its about the price of the Noctua so didn't see much point in changing to the Fenrir.

garylouden · 26 May 2009 at 17:57

So does anyone have any idea what sort of performance increase i will get in games, video encoding, the odd VM and general multi tasking?

1337z0r · 26 May 2009 at 18:31

garylouden said:
So does anyone have any idea what sort of performance increase i will get in games, video encoding, the odd VM and general multi tasking?

Should see a huge improvement in video encoding and you should be able to run multiple virtual machines with no problems what so ever, even more that you will have an extra 2GB of ram to play with allowing you to dedicate more memory to specific VM's.

FaceplantSi · 26 May 2009 at 19:48

That spec is almost exactly what I have just gone to - already had the case and cooler etc but mobo, CPU and RAM were put in this last weekend - the loudest thing in my case is my 4870X2 card!

Check out my thread here for some more performance info. It's blisteringly fast - I had Q9550 @ 3.4GHz before so not exactly a slouch, but this thing is just something else. Of course I suspect the SSD's and Win7's optimisations may account for some of that, but even so the D0 stepping chip is just so easy to OC and to get 4Ghz with so little effort... well, I know I'm future proof for sure!

cmndr_andi · 26 May 2009 at 19:53

Check this out if you want to save some money on the RAM, hardly any real world performance dip compared to the 2000MHz stuff (and that £70 RAM can overclock that high). I'm not quite sure what you mean about not using the multiplier (the BCLK is so low you need to use a multiplier to get a decent RAM speed).

The corsair looks like a nice PSU but If its modular you want, this one is awesome. If you don;t need it to be modular, then this an even better power supply.

FaceplantSi · 26 May 2009 at 19:59

I agree with Cmdr Andi about the BeQuiet! PSU - they are very very good and almost totally silent too - and seeing as you are going for the Silverstone Fortress I would suggest you go the modular route as cable tidying is so much easier. And after all getting as much clean airflow is a must when clocking these chips!

garylouden · 26 May 2009 at 21:44

FaceplantSi said:
That spec is almost exactly what I have just gone to - already had the case and cooler etc but mobo, CPU and RAM were put in this last weekend - the loudest thing in my case is my 4870X2 card! Check out my thread here for some more performance info. It's blisteringly fast - I had Q9550 @ 3.4GHz before so not exactly a slouch, but this thing is just something else. Of course I suspect the SSD's and Win7's optimisations may account for some of that, but even so the D0 stepping chip is just so easy to OC and to get 4Ghz with so little effort... well, I know I'm future proof for sure!

So you think i would see a big performance difference even without the ssd's?

VoG · 26 May 2009 at 21:50

garylouden said:
So does anyone have any idea what sort of performance increase i will get in games, video encoding, the odd VM and general multi tasking?

in games, negligable, as there's barely a handful of games that benefit from quads atm, vid encoding & VM for sure as that kinda thing is right up the i7's street.

garylouden · 27 May 2009 at 08:13

VoG said:
in games, negligable, as there's barely a handful of games that benefit from quads atm, vid encoding & VM for sure as that kinda thing is right up the i7's street.

I have heard a lot of people saying quads make no difference and understand why (because the games are not coded to utilise extra cores) but wont they make a difference because the other programs in the background will be utilizing different cores allowing for more processing priority/time for the games?

cmndr_andi · 27 May 2009 at 08:26

garylouden said:
I have heard a lot of people saying quads make no difference and understand why (because the games are not coded to utilise extra cores) but wont they make a difference because the other programs in the background will be utilizing different cores allowing for more processing priority/time for the games?

Yes, this is true (especially if you play around with the core affinity so not everything runs on Core0 by default). But the increase is only minor in non-threaded games because the work offloaded is usually low intensity (less than 5% max usage). Hence - why it is true that a faster clocked dual core will usually beat a similar architecture quad. However, games are coming out that are properly threaded - so a quad cores 4 threads and an i7s 8 threads will finally be properly utilised in games.

garylouden · 27 May 2009 at 13:42

cmndr_andi said:
Yes, this is true (especially if you play around with the core affinity so not everything runs on Core0 by default). But the increase is only minor in non-threaded games because the work offloaded is usually low intensity (less than 5% max usage). Hence - why it is true that a faster clocked dual core will usually beat a similar architecture quad. However, games are coming out that are properly threaded - so a quad cores 4 threads and an i7s 8 threads will finally be properly utilised in games.

Ok I get what your saying, makes sense.

I wonder though even if a program doesn't utilise any other cores would the extra OC (I would get to at least 3.6ghz, maybe further) make it a worth while upgrade?

garylouden · 27 May 2009 at 19:20

I have decided to bite the bullet and order this "upgrade" in the next few days as i would like to jump on the quad core train

If anyone has any suggestions i would love to hear them.

I have also decided that the patriot viper ram would be a better choice as its cheaper, tighter timing and will look betting on the gigabyte motherboard.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-008-PA