So I want to Upgrade my Motherboard....

Michael172 · 27 Apr 2012 at 10:45

Guys, this is possibly my third thread, so im sorry. Current specs;

i5 750, running 4GHz (Can run 4.2 with "turbo mode")
8GB Gskill Ripjaws, 1600mhz
Gigabyte P55 UD5H
Crucial M4 SSD
GTX 680
Xonar STX

Ive taken peoples advice - sticking with my i5 750. Apparently I wont see much of an improvement if I upgrade to IB so theres no real point so ill wait for the new chips to be released later in the year.

I would like to upgrade my mainboard however in order to take advantage of SATA3.

If I do, itll have to be socket 1155, so its likely ill need to upgrade the whole lot (CPU, board, ram) next time I come to upgrading.

Is this wise? Im not fussed about shelling out £200 for a board along with some more ram (maybe) to take it to 16GB or something. I get the feeling I might be able to push the 750 a little further too.

So do I;

Leave it
Upgrade the full lot with IB
Buy a new mainboard and ram
Buy a new mainboard

Thanks.

andybird123 · 27 Apr 2012 at 11:28

your current CPU isn't a bottleneck but if you are going to upgrade your motherboard anyway for sata 3 you may as well upgrade everything and sell off your old mobo/CPU to fund it

you won't need new ram as they are both DDR3

IvyBridge doesn't offer a much of an improvement over Sandy so if you can get a good deal on a sandy then don't necessarily turn that down either

Haswell won't be out later this year either, more like late 2013 at the earliest

El Jimben · 27 Apr 2012 at 12:20

I can't see the point in upgrading just to get SATA3 especially when you won't notice any real world difference in terms of speeds. You could just get a SATA3 PCI-E controller card instead?

spain · 27 Apr 2012 at 13:33

El Jimben said:
I can't see the point in upgrading just to get SATA3 especially when you won't notice any real world difference in terms of speeds. You could just get a SATA3 PCI-E controller card instead?

+1

cmndr_andi · 27 Apr 2012 at 13:47

Unfortunately, since the southbridge on all the P55 boards only supports up to SATA2 then you really don't have the option to upgrade to a LGA1156 board with native SATA3. There are some LGA 1156 boards that support SATA3 using separate controllers connected to the PCIE bus - but to be honest these aren't any better than an add-in SATA3 PCIEx1 card you can buy for ~£20 and not a scratch on the performance of a native SATA3 port (like those on Sandy bridge/ivy bridge boards). Therefore, I would personally stick with the native SATA2 ports on your existing board until you next upgrade (perhaps for haswell).

As has been mentioned, in terms of perceivable performance you won't be able to tell whether your M4 SSD is running on a SATA2 or SATA3 port - so it really isn't really worth the cost and hassle of the upgrade if this is what you are worried about. SSDs are so great because they are super-fast to respond and can do small reads/writes ~100x faster than a mechanical hard drive. This performance is hardly restricted when you use a SATA2 port with a SATA3 SSD, though there is a performance reduction when transferring large files - though this is done much more rarely.