CPU Upgrade Time (From i7 920...)

Ayahuasca · 2 Mar 2016 at 10:24

Keep an eye out for the 5660's and 5670's as well, sometimes they aren't much more.

Kylevdm · 2 Mar 2016 at 10:31

Yeah I did a "fat fingers" search including x5660 and found one for £2 more

Draeger · 2 Mar 2016 at 10:37

Kylevdm said:
The ones at £57.99 have sold out (44 between midnight and now ) looks like I will go searching and should have just bought one last night!

Wow. That was quick! I sent the guy a cheeky 'Best Offer' of £50 and it was declined. So I left it till later on yesterday afternoon and sent him an altered offer of £55 and he accepted. Glad I did it when I did!

Just shows you how sought after these CPU's are I suppose.

Kylevdm · 2 Mar 2016 at 10:39

Yeah it is insane! But if it gives us all a massive performance boost for £60 then I can see why!

LS_Chao · 2 Mar 2016 at 11:20

DO NOT get the Xeon if you do CAD, CAD is single threaded and a Xeon x56x0 series would be SLOWER than your current set up. If you value you CAD performance, do not buy a 6 year old server CPU!

AiiR · 2 Mar 2016 at 11:24

LS_Chao said:
DO NOT get the Xeon if you do CAD, CAD is single threaded and a Xeon x56x0 series would be SLOWER than your current set up. If you value you CAD performance, do not buy a 6 year old server CPU!

Single thread would be the same as a 920?

Kylevdm · 2 Mar 2016 at 11:38

LS_Chao said:
DO NOT get the Xeon if you do CAD, CAD is single threaded and a Xeon x56x0 series would be SLOWER than your current set up. If you value you CAD performance, do not buy a 6 year old server CPU!

Eagle CAD is multithreaded for the only tool that requires it.

LS_Chao · 2 Mar 2016 at 11:50

Well if you are confident about that then the server cpu would be a good deal.
Never heard of eagle CAD, I am a mechanical engineer though

Kylevdm · 2 Mar 2016 at 11:58

It is for designing PCBs, the primary high resource event is routing 1000s of connections between components. It does this by brute forcing them calculating which is most efficient so the more cores the better

LS_Chao · 2 Mar 2016 at 12:25

I see, in that case you could get 2 maybe, will need a different mobo though. Will be faster than a 5820k.

ED209 · 2 Mar 2016 at 12:49

as others have said get the Xeon as it will help with cpu intensive stuff.

i have the I7 950 which i can overclock to 4.2ghz on air.

tempted to get e Xeon too for it

Kylevdm · 2 Mar 2016 at 13:01

It arrives next week, along with a GTX970. So I will have a decent upgrade. Only RAM to upgrade now.

AiiR · 2 Mar 2016 at 13:48

Kylevdm said:
It arrives next week, along with a GTX970. So I will have a decent upgrade. Only RAM to upgrade now.

I have a 5650 and a 970, cost me £250 all in. Less than a new CPU!

Kelt · 2 Mar 2016 at 13:54

ED209 said:
as others have said get the Xeon as it will help with cpu intensive stuff.

i have the I7 950 which i can overclock to 4.2ghz on air.

tempted to get e Xeon too for it

Get one while they're going, cracking CPU!

Nasher · 2 Mar 2016 at 14:43

Xeon would be the cheapest route. Otherwise go X99. Those are about the only worthwhile options tbh.

ED209 · 2 Mar 2016 at 15:04

Kelt said:
Get one while they're going, cracking CPU!

i think i may, ill add it to the birthday wish list! lol maybe ill add a antec 271mm AIO to it as well

Dave2150 · 2 Mar 2016 at 17:16

Kylevdm said:
Hey all,

I last upgraded my PC properly in 2009 before I went to university, since then I avoided our little (expensive) hobby for a while as I only ever played games and did research for uni.

Now however, I have a job (yay disposable income) and am doing a lot more in the way of CPU intensive work in my spare time. I work as an electronic engineer so do a fair amount of CAD work in my spare time to try and improve my skills as fast as possible. Additionally I am going to be doing a fair amount of image and video processing for my website.

So as I am currently on the i7 920 it is very much time for me to upgrade, I just want to get your opinions on what chip I should go for I am edging towards the 5820k but with the new CPUs due out in Q2 is it worth waiting out for them? I would be looking at the PC lasting another 2-3 years really.

Thanks all!

I'd absolutely wait for Broadwell-E. It's not far away and should be a good upgrade over Haswell-E.

jonclark · 2 Mar 2016 at 17:34

If you're not too worried about buying 2nd hand parts, I recently went from i7 920 @ 3.8Ghz (C0) to 2500k for basically nothing. I bought my X58 mobo (ga-ex58-ds4)/cpu/ram (corsair vengeance) combo on the bay for £100 a year ago, turns out the ram was 12gb not 6gb, then sold all of that recently for £110 which covered a 2500k sabertooth p67 and 8gb ram.

I used to do cad at home so the 12gb was handy but I hadn't done any modelling in a few months, so it made sense for me to drop to a 95w chip from 130w (especially as I hung onto the gtx 480).

tribz · 2 Mar 2016 at 18:50

Wasnt that a bit of a side / downgrade going from an i7 with Hyper threading to an i5 without? When I benchmarked my 4770k and my X5670 both at 4.4GHz the X5670 was ahead in multi threaded benches so I'd imagine a 2500k would be a downgrade with less threads than the 920?

jonclark · 2 Mar 2016 at 20:37

I had to turn the HT off at 3.8 - too much heat!