6 Years old - must be time to upgrade?

owens2000

owens2000

owens2000

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I can't believe my current rig is 6 years old already ! I's still running admirably well but does lack that certain oomph in a few games.
With several iterations of intel processor released since the previous decade, surely it's time to upgrade and propell my system into the next generation?

Is it time to upgrade to a Skylake configuration and will I see a justifiable performance boost ?
From what I've read I'm not so sure....

Asus P7P55D-E
i5-760 running @4GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM @1600MH
GTX-770

I've got an upgrade itch I want to scratch but maybe I should get some cream for that.

Thanks in advance
 
As someone else who had two 6 and a half year old machines. Definitely time to upgrade my friend. I went with an X99 build for my gaming machine and a Z79 build for my main PC. But it's up to you what route you decide to go down. I'm happy with what I have in both my machines.

It's really down to how much you want to spend. Whilst I got a few new stuff, others I bought 2nd hand.

And whether you go with Skylake or Haswell-E, you will definitely notice a huge performance boost.

But I will move aside and let the more advanced experts give their input. This was just mine as I was in the same position as yourself a couple months ago. :)
 
owens2000 said:
Is it time to upgrade to a Skylake configuration and will I see a justifiable performance boost ?
From what I've read I'm not so sure....
Click to expand...

If upgrading to Skylake then I would say you are probably looking at 25% speedup.

By moving to a newer platform though you are getting more than just performance though, with newer tech such as native USB3 (or 3.1 now), PCI-E SSD support, PCI-E 3.0 (vs your 2.0) etc.


owens2000 said:
GTX-770
Click to expand...

Might be worth upgrading this first, as your I5 @ 4Ghz shouldn't bottleneck a new card too badly (and with DX12 around the corner, CPU's should become less of a bottleneck anyway)

You could then upgrade the CPU/Motherboard afterwards.

Depending on what games you play, may make a difference as to where you feel your current system is limited.

I assume you have an SSD, but if not then that is another worthwhile upgrade.
 
dacads said:
I would definitely upgrade, that's not a bad chip but it's getting on a bit. You will see up to a 50% increase in performance which I would call worthwhile.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/191?vs=1544

Maybe you can go with Haswell so you can keep your DDR3 RAM.
Click to expand...

Bearing in mind the clock he's running his 760 at (+43%) he'll not see that big a gain really - also those benches are better than games for making use of newer instructions so in game the gains are generally smaller. The graphics card is the weakest part of his setup but it's not terrible either. If he's not got an SSD yet (not that common 6 years ago) then I'd say do that.

Otherwise only upgrade because you want to, not for performance reasons (yes, performance will be better, but not enough to really justify significant cost). New stuff is nice, maybe you could justify it by getting a nice new case, or try to make a quieter build or something?
 
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DDR 4 is hitting a sensible price, and although CPU upgrades nowadays are incremental rather than giant leaps, there have been several.

In short, an upgrade is definitely going to give a worthwhile, if not earth-shattering, performance increase.

My 6 year old rig (slightly less powerful than yours) is noticeably slower in games than my Brother's 1 year old rig. Both are similar in desktop performance (I added an SSD) but the 6 year old build is definitely lagging behind in gaming.
 
Thanks all for your input.

The general consensus then is that I would see a tangible performance boost to justify the upgrade…. The answer I was hoping for :-)
I’ve not built a main rig before, apart from a mini-itx for my HTPC, so my plan is to find something pre-built which fits the spec I think I want…. Rather lazy and unambitious I know.

New Case & Power Supply
New Motherboard
i5-6600k overclocked with a Decent, quiet Cooler
16GB Ram

I’ll aim to transfer the SSD, GPU and hard disks to the new system and whack on Windows 10.
 
I'm still running my old 2500k which must be a fair few years old now. Does everything I want it to do still, just don't get the upgrade itch any more. For you running a first gen i5 I'd say it was probably worth an upgrade. Best thing you can do is get an ssd though.
 
IvanDobskey said:
I'm still running my old 2500k which must be a fair few years old now. Does everything I want it to do still, just don't get the upgrade itch any more. For you running a first gen i5 I'd say it was probably worth an upgrade. Best thing you can do is get an ssd though.
Click to expand...

Same, my 2600k still spanks the crap out of anything i throw at it.

I won't consider upgrading until 4k is a lot cheaper, by then haswell will be cheaper and i'll grab that instead of breaking the bank on skylake.

maybe at the end of this year i'll grab a 980ti when they're not rip off prices either
 
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