3930K getting a bit long in the tooth

[Screv]

With all the recent announcements from Intel regarding the new products coming out in a few months and all the new AMD kit that is on the market, I feel now is a good time to start thinking about and planning an upgrade.

The i7 3930K has been an awesome chip for my needs the last five years but I am starting to really feel the limitations in both the processor and the X79 chipset. No support in the Bios for NVME memory, gen 2 PCIe (although there is a workaround, it is not ideal for me) and a few other smaller issues which have become more apparent over the years.

So my question is this; what would a decent upgrade package look like? I like the high core and thread count as it works well for the VM and emulation work I do. I would love to move to PCIe storage for some DB and VM workloads. Decent scope for future upgrades without having to do a while CPU/MB/Memory swap after two years.

Price is flexible, I intend for this rig to last another 5+ years with some pecemeal upgrading over its lifespan. I have an Intel 750 1.2TB NVME PCIe HHHL card in a test rig I intend to migrate over to my personal desktop with the future build

Current system specs for reference

Processor: i7 3930k @ 4.0Ghz OC'ed
MB: EVGA x79 SLI
Memory: Patriot Viper Xtreme 16GB Quad Channel Kit
GFX: MSI GTX 1080
Storage: 1x 128GB SSD 4x mixed spinning disk (total storage 6TB)
Cooling: Corsair H100
Case: Corsair Carbide 500R
PSU: Corsair TX550M Modular

Ancillary: 1x WiFi card, USB 3 add-in card, DVD R/W

Any suggestions would be great.

 

[Kelt]

16 core Threadripper.

 

[Tom B]

Wait and see how X299 and X399 look. Likely a better bang for buck with AMD though.

 

[Phemo]

Yep, that's my thoughts too. Wait a bit for both platforms to be out so we can get an idea of pricing etc, but I suspect a Threadripper setup will be the answer here.

 

[Yaayuh!]

I went from 3930K @ 4.4GHz to Ryzen 1800x @ 4GHz, no regrets!

 

[Screv]

Thanks for the replies. Based on the recommendations here, I did some more reading on Intel's proposed offerings, cant say I am all that impresses. Gimping PCI lanes and memory capacity/lanes based on part pricing is an insane move in my mind. Given the lack of detail information from Intel at present, I think AMD's offerings are the more interesting prospect.

Does anyone have experience with the new Ryzen platform with regard to virtualisation workloads? Stability, performance and compatibility are my major interests.

Again, thanks for the recommendations. AMD processors seem to be the only sensible long term option, starting to think they may have pulled something like the x64 move; a leg up on Intel.

 

[humbug]

Thanks for the replies. Based on the recommendations here, I did some more reading on Intel's proposed offerings, cant say I am all that impresses. Gimping PCI lanes and memory capacity/lanes based on part pricing is an insane move in my mind. Given the lack of detail information from Intel at present, I think AMD's offerings are the more interesting prospect.

Does anyone have experience with the new Ryzen platform with regard to virtualisation workloads? Stability, performance and compatibility are my major interests.

Again, thanks for the recommendations. AMD processors seem to be the only sensible long term option, starting to think they may have pulled something like the x64 move; a leg up on Intel.

1700, its doesn't clock to 4.4Ghz but i don't think that matters because the IPC is significantly higher on Ryzen, add to that 2 more cores....

Yes, you could wait for Skylake-X and i have no doubt it will be faster than Ryzen per core because of higher clock speeds, but not by much and they are as you said IO and expansion gimped unless you get the most expensive ones, if you are going to wait that wait is better served on Threadripper as you do get more for a lot less money.