Man of Honour
- Joined
- 21 Nov 2004
- Posts
- 45,038
Sure, my 9550 is still more than enough for gaming at this res.
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is the i7 920 good for another year or two?
- Thread starter Pate
- Start date
Sure, my 9550 is still more than enough for gaming at this res.
Caporegime
Whack another 470 in for some sli action, theyre cheap as chips now.Yeah I'm not considering a CPU upgrade until at least Haswell depending on performance it offers/improved power consumption etc. New GPU prices are a little disconcerting though. My trusty overclocked GTX470 is feeling a little old now!
Soldato
Still waiting for Keifer Intel's 32 core offering, ETA 2010
What we got was 6 cores and sandybridge, I guess thats it but not half as impressed as 32 sounds
What we got was 6 cores and sandybridge, I guess thats it but not half as impressed as 32 sounds
Associate
Just run an SSD on SATA2. For day to day operation it won't make much a difference, if it's just for your OS then the smaller reads and writes are far more important and well within SATA2 limits. You'll rarely need the high sequential speeds that SATA3 allow.
Associate
I concur this.
I upgraded my Raptor to an Intel 510 series SSD and the extra performance is very, very high. If your worried your SATA 2 chipset will bottleneck your SSD don't worry about it, just take the plunge with what you got and reap the benefits. I would not throw away my money at a new x58 motherboard with non Intel controllers just for the sake of having SATA 3, not unless I really needed USB 3.0.
I have also been doing lots of research into a new platform and to be honest its not really needed as such, this i7 920 x58 platform has been amazing, in fact its the best system I have ever built and I am running all stock.
I am quite curious to know how much difference there would be running a new GTX 680 on a stock i7 920 compared to something like the i7 3820 or 2700K. The temptation to upgrade is itching away at me and I like a new project to mess around with but its just spending money at the sake of spending money, especially when the 920 + GTX 580 combo handles anything I can throw at it.
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Soldato
Won't ever be native SATA 3 though, the horrible Marvell usually.
The G1 Sniper uses the Marvell 9182 controller which is a vast improvement over the 9128 controller used on a lot of boards.
The 9182 controller is pretty much on a par with native SATA 3.
Soldato
No it ain't, i've built 2 pcs with that board (replacements for dead older X58 boards but users wanted to keep the cpu etc..), driver support may have been an issue at the time but the benches were a bit off from the intel Sata III and my own IBM Sata 3 Raid card (M1015) + The Agility 3 drives seemed not to like it at all and frequently dropped out on boot, didn't do it on the SATA 2 controller, i would say its more the drives controller than the Marvell though, its definetly an improvement over the older ones but nothing to write home about. Things could well have improved since and likely have.
I have a i7 920 clocked at 4Ghz, I've had it for about three years now I think and it works wonderfully. It has no trouble playing games and running high resolutions (5760x1080) so should be good for another year or two. If you do want to upgrade I'd wait for the IVY bridge chip and that depends on if it's a decent clocker. If it's anything like sandy bridge you should be able to get it to 5 Ghz with ease along with a cool below 30 degree idle state.
=]
=]
Soldato
Soldato
the OP is banned anyway so he won't be replying 
Associate
Should be fine for another few years, I picked one up recently along with an ASUS P6T Deluxe v2 for £60 (Buy it now too! Yeah, some people on the bay don't realise the value of things ) a and overclocked it to 4.0GHz. Works better than I could have ever expected!
) a and overclocked it to 4.0GHz. Works better than I could have ever expected!
Caporegime
Ive thought about upgrading mine a few times, then i take a reality check and realise it wouldnt be worth it. Decided instead on an upgrade to an ssd and 12gb of ram instead.
Soldato
Man of Honour
I've been looking into this as well, and I still can't see a reason to upgrade. The steady march of games needing more power has slowed, because every game needs to work on consoles, so there's no push from that direction. I could go Sandybridge-E to get two more cores, with a slightly better o/c (my 1920 is at 4.2GHz), but at the cost of a big increase in leccie consumption - and my utility bills are already £120 a month. Or I could go normal Sandybridge and get a much better overclock and lower bills, but for little extra gain in performance. Or I could wait for Ivybridge, which just seems to be Sandybridge with better peripheral support.
I'd like to upgrade, but I really can't see what I'd gain that would be worth the expense.
M
I'd like to upgrade, but I really can't see what I'd gain that would be worth the expense.
M
Soldato
The i7 920 does bottleneck at stock speeds.
I noticed the other day my BF3 FPS going up and down a lot, looking at MSI Afterburner I noticed my GPU usage was everywhere, sometimes as low as 40% per GPU, but mostly in the 60% - 70% range. After trying everything I found my CPU overclock had been disabled, once enabled again my GPU usage is now between 92% and 100%.
So yea, at stock the 920 is limiting modern games on modern cards.
Overclocked to 4Ghz it is only just managing to give SLI 470s the grunt needed to achieve 100% GPU utilization.
This is at 1680x1050
I noticed the other day my BF3 FPS going up and down a lot, looking at MSI Afterburner I noticed my GPU usage was everywhere, sometimes as low as 40% per GPU, but mostly in the 60% - 70% range. After trying everything I found my CPU overclock had been disabled, once enabled again my GPU usage is now between 92% and 100%.
So yea, at stock the 920 is limiting modern games on modern cards.
Overclocked to 4Ghz it is only just managing to give SLI 470s the grunt needed to achieve 100% GPU utilization.
This is at 1680x1050
Caporegime
^I can agree with dave on this. At stock i get similair low gpu usage, at 4ghz the cards never drop below 99% gpu utilization, gpu's clocked at 750mhz. Resolution at 1920x1200.