i7 920 - upgrade now?

[Genoma]

Genoma, I am in a similar situation.
Currently running the i7 930 at 4ghz, but have a rampage iii extreme so have some sata 3 and usb on board - albeit on rubbish controllers.

I was just going to go all out and get an x-99 system with a pair of 970's and re do my water cooling while i was at it.

I could just stick in one of these though, and then upgrade my gpus.

What sort of speed up are you noticing? I will be using the additional in video editing and autocad - although i don't think that scales, at all

I think you need to be honest in what you need, I'm the first one to admit I'll upgrade for just for fun/something to tinker with, keep up with tech, etc.

The truth is that I didn't really need a new system, it was a nice to have for several reasons and my conclusion is that my money is better invested elsewhere (I will benefit much more from a large NAS for example).

However, what I managed to achieve for a *much* smaller investment is:

• Nice new case with much better cable management and quieter cooling. Everything is clean, dust free and tidy now.
• USB3 (new card) and USB3 headers on top of the case (my old Antec didn't have them). I use this a lot with external USB HDDs so great addition.
• Additional two cores / 4 threads! For the £60 investment in the Xeon (prob. £40 after I sell the i920) that's a dramatic 50% increase in compute power. For me, notably this affects Handbrake video encoding for which should scale pretty much in line with the core/thread increase. Large Photoshop merge work will benefit too, arguably I don't do this every day though. Not sure how much this impacts Lightroom which I also use a lot.
• A lower TDP on the Xeon, cooler (and more importantly quieter as a result).

If your focus is gaming, let's be honest, your current system is more than capable to dealing with CPU gaming demands.

So:

Rebuilding my system into a new case, new fans, new USB3 card, was really what I needed. The extra cores were a nice to have and a no brainer given the £60 investment in the chip. I now have zero reasons to upgrade this system in the forseeable future. There is probably very few people (including me) that *really* need 6x 4GHz cores of CPU power!

Having said that if you just want to upgrade, hey that's valid too!

 

[Ch3m1c4L]

I have ordered a Xeon x5650 now

Will see how it goes. Technically I can render on my server too, if I wanted to render two sets of footage at once etc. Since I don't have many effects or anything, just downsampling from lossless screen cap to Youtube friendly rates. Although the Xeon might make recording with Xsplit while playing more viable on high end games - Will have to see.

I did a cine bench and got somewhere around 550, people are reporting 950 odd with the xeons clocked up, and the new i7 5930ks get around 1200. So, £60 for a very large % upgrade, and then to move to x99 it would be ~1k for what I want, for a then 30% upgrade.
Think I will wait for now and stagger my upgrades a bit rather than go full system replace.

Will now go

Xeon x5650
SLI 970s or similar (best at time of purchase)
2 x 1TB SSD's once cheap enough
Upgrade my cooling to ideally rpelace the top 240 rad with a thicker 360 I have, maybe fit another one somewhere else.
Replace resevoirs with ones that can go in my 5.25 bays, hold the pumps and look super cool.
Monitor replacements when the 144hz IPS large panels have come down in price to resonable levels/are worth it, maybe just one instead of three.

Then upgrade the CPU/Mobo/RAM to whatever is modern at that time.

Unless ofc this xeon turns out to not be good enough for me, then it will all just happen as soon as i can afford it/get bored enough/it breaks

 

[Matty_Boy]

I went from a i7 930 to a Xeon X5670 (@4.2Ghz) and GTX970 SLI. Rig is plenty fast now for some time to come. Also added a USB3 card to increase the connectivity. These old X58 rigs are awesome value!