Am I going to see a benefit???......

R.O.S.S.I · 10 Apr 2012 at 19:46

I've been umming and ahhing for absolutely AGES about upgrading my machine. At the moment I currently have a Q6600, with 16GB DDR2 RAM in a Gigabyte EP 43-S3L motherboard. My hard drives are a Vertex 2e 60GB that I boot from and 1GB storage drive. My graphics is a Gefore 460.

I've been eyeing up these i5 2500k systems for a while now and i'm just trying to weigh up if there will be a good speed increase (i.e. worthwhile) to upgrade from my current specs.

I'll only be upgrading the motherboard, CPU, RAM and SSD.

Q6600 -> i5 2500k
Current mobo (USB2, DDR2 and SATA2) -> New mobo (PCI 3.0, USB3, DDR3, SATA3)
Vertex 2e 60GB (SATA2) -> Corsair Force 3 240GB (SATA3)
16GB DDR2 RAM -> 8GB (Poss 16GB) PC3-12800 DDR3 RAM.

Will those jumps in CPU, motherboard, RAM (DDR2->DDR3) and SSD (I know capacity is a given benefit but the jump from SATA2->SATA3) give me huge performance gains bearing in mind I do not play games. The majority of my time on my PC is spent making music (using multiple software VST's, manipulating WAV audio), editing in Photoshop (some 3D, life size banners, posters, flyers etc), some video editing and general internet, pr0n, Facebook etc.

olivier renault · 10 Apr 2012 at 19:59

hmm I would say no unless you are unhappy with your current performance. Then I would go for i7 Ivy. You will need £450-£500 to make it worth your while.

shadow_boxer · 10 Apr 2012 at 20:13

I would say it's worth the upgrade to Ivy Bridge if your looking to improve performance wrt video editing and Photoshop. Seeing as you've been thinking about it for ages a couple of more weeks won't hurt.

You should also be able to recoup some of the cost especially with 16GB of RAM, that's got to be worth a fair bit.

Music production isn't generally too CPU intensive but you will definitely see improvements in Photoshop and video editing.

Something along the lines of an Ivy Bridge i5 (the replacement for the i5-2500K), budget(ish) motherboard such as the Gigabyte Z77X-D3H which has plenty of features and 16GB RAM.

This Kingston RAM is very cheap, could even pick that up now as you have free shipping.

Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit

Less than £60 for 16GB branded RAM!

Oh, props for the honesty.

R.O.S.S.I said:
...pr0n...

Do you have your Q6600 overclocked?

R.O.S.S.I · 10 Apr 2012 at 20:39

Thanks for the response guys.

No the Q6600 is stock, never really bothered with the overclockingness until I saw the i5 2500k's were dead easy to get good gains from.

What sort of price point are the Ivybridge chips going to be when they release? Same as the i5's out now? (£165ish?)

I may just wait, what sort of performance increase does the Ivy i5 have over the Sandy i5 is it worthwhile?

shadow_boxer · 10 Apr 2012 at 20:45

I would try overclocking it. The Q6600 despite getting on a bit is still pretty capable if overclocked. With a decent cooler you should be able to get it to around 3.2GHz and if you're lucky 3.6GHz. No harm in waiting to see how it performs.

shadow_boxer said:
No guarantee prices will drop. We'll probably see them cropping up on offer from time to time as retailers clear stock but unlikely to see wholesale price drops. Ivy Bridge is expected to be around 5-15% quicker and they'll more than likely be priced higher than their equivalent Sandy Bridge counterparts rather than coming in as direct replacements. You will however see plenty cropping up in members markets and classifieds as people who have that upgrade itch look to upgrade. If you can wait for a few weeks then you should do but if you go for Sandy Bridge now it won't be an issue.

R.O.S.S.I · 10 Apr 2012 at 20:57

Thanks for that shadow_boxer.....think I'm going to wait till Ivybridge is out and then pick up and i5 2500k or i7 2600k for cheap in Members Market (well thats the plan ahha!)