• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Core i7-950 No really worth upgrading from?

stoofa

stoofa

stoofa

Soldato
Joined
4 Mar 2003
Posts
12,525
Location
Chatteris
Thanks to an amazing HD failure I'm about to reinstall my system. I usually use such opportunities to upgrade any hardware that I think is looking a little outdated.
I recently invested in a Creative SB Recon3D and I've got a Crucial M4 to replace the much old SSD that failed.

I'm running:

Intel Core i7-950
ASUS P6X58D-E

Am I right in thinking that I wouldn't really notice any kind of performance increase (I mean from a "bang for buck" point of view) by upgrading to something based on X79 (Socket 2011) or anything based on Socket 1155?

I know I would get a slight increast in disk performance - with native SATA 6GB/s support the Crucial M4 drives should run impressively.
But other than that would you recommend waiting a little longer for the next generation?

Ta
 
Sandybridge is a huge leap forward over the 1366 socket so it comes down to the cost involved in upgrading. Socket 2011 is rather expensive at the moment and at the end of the day if your current system does everything you want it to do in a timely fashion then why bother upgrading? I run a 930 @ 4GHz and won't be upgrading to IvyBridge or even the one after that (will have to wait and see what happens). The bottom line is if you can afford it then you would see an increase in performance it's just if you can justify it to yourself for the cost involved.

Stoner81.
 
It will be a few years before an overclocked 1st gen i7 or Phenom 2 are not good enough for the latest games. I'll probably upgrade from my Phenom 2 to Ivybridge though if the benchmarks are around 50% better.
 
It depends what you use the machine for.

I had an i7 970 which was great (used it for video editing) but the motherboard had gradually started to fail - and it didn't support 6Gbs sata so I decided to flog it and go socket 2011 with the i7 3820 on the grounds that when Ivy-E comes out I can just swap out the cpu.

If you need the speed boost of quad-channel memory for intensive work then go socket 2011 if not and your rig is working fine I would stay put until Ivy comes out later this year then have another think.
 
Yeah it depends what you're doing. Stoner summed it up pretty well.

As far as bang for buck, there's no real reason to upgrade your system. Though the M4 speeds may be limited it will still be speeding up Windows and loading times, and the read/write speeds will still be far better than an HDD.
 
Mate I have the same mobo and CPU as you (see my sig), save your money and keep your current kit. The general upgrading rule is when your machine starts to struggle to do certain tasks which results in things such as low frame rates in newer games , or encoding takes too long, etc only then is it a good idea to upgrade unless you just like to have the newest tech to play with!

I haven't come across anything that I do that taxes the hell out of my rig yet, except maybe a couple new games (looking into kepler later on)
 
no, stop wasting your time thinking about it. Nehalem and Sandy Bridge are more or less equals in clock for clock performance, Sandy Bridge is a 'bit' faster (its not remotely miles faster) clock for clock, will clock higher and run cooler but in the grand scheme of things its total waste of time, same goes for Ivy Bridge unless it bring something substantial to the table, which frankly at the moment it doesn't look 'that' impressive, just a higher clocked Sandy Bridge with some other tweaks.
 
Stoner81 said:
Sandybridge is a huge leap forward over the 1366 socket
Click to expand...

Disagree.

The leap isn't huge but seems to be rather modest increase of around 20% in performance overall going by different benches.

Lga1366 cpus are still very powerful.

It will be big leap over lga775 though ;)
 
Gashman said:
no, stop wasting your time thinking about it. Nehalem and Sandy Bridge are more or less equals in clock for clock performance, Sandy Bridge is a 'bit' faster (its not remotely miles faster) clock for clock, will clock higher and run cooler but in the grand scheme of things its total waste of time, same goes for Ivy Bridge unless it bring something substantial to the table, which frankly at the moment it doesn't look 'that' impressive, just a higher clocked Sandy Bridge with some other tweaks.
Click to expand...

How do you find BD? I find my self strangely attracted to it.
 
opethdisciple said:
How do you find BD? I find my self strangely attracted to it.
Click to expand...

well, I have noticed nothing in the way of slow-down or anything in anything I do compared to my 1055T at 4GHZ, feels smoother in day to day operation and doesn't get that hot, did 4GHZ without any trouble with stock cooler and temperatures stayed under their maximum even with loads of stuff going on.

biggest problems are programs that don't do anything to make use of the design, like Starcraft II for example which uses a grand total of ~3 threads, and since Windows is utterly stupid beyond belief it doesn't automatically do either A) allocate the threads, one to each module therefore maximising potential performance by removing the sharing 'penalty' and it doesn't efficiently allocate them two threads to each module to maximise Turbo Core speed either, in-fact there is a load of 'core jumping' going on and frequencies changing constantly because of it which cannot be helping in the slightest.

to be honest, only got hold of this one (~£129) because I got a decent price on 1055T and had AM3+ motherboard so thought 'why not...?', on the plus side its rather fun to tinker with, though the CPU-NB tends to be much much more tricky than the older Phenom II were. also problem is I use Windows Vista so cannot use the scheduling patch, so unsure whether that fixes the core jumping business. so all in all, seems reasonable, not fantastic but far from the slouch its made out to be. ;)
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
This article is interesting to read:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/processor-architecture-benchmark,review-32238-15.html

The main improvements that SB will have is lower power consumption and a higher average overclock.

IMHO,I would hold on until Haswell unless you can sell your existing setup and move over to Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge at minimal cost.
Click to expand...

That's broadly right IMO. My i5 SB runs cooler and quieter than my i7 920 but there's no real performance difference. The i5 has some interesting chipset features that I use like SRT and Virtu.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom