Spec me - advice

Associate
Joined
12 Dec 2009
Posts
624
Location
Gloucester, UK
Hi there,

My GPU recently died which has led me to go down the dangerous path of looking at components again and I am toying with the idea of maybe upgrading the rest of my system.

System Use:

Mainly gaming and designing (photoshop, illustrator).

Parts I will carry over:

SSDs x 2, HDDs, x2 (1TBs), Power Supply (superflower 1000w). GPU (currently working on RMA'ing it).

Initially I want to just upgrade the mobo and all parts that go with that, so RAM etc. I'll worry about GPU later on. I game at 1080p right now, but think I'll move to 1440p in the near future. Budget ideally for this part of the build would be around £800-900 - depending on if this is enough, I'd love to change cases and get a phanteks enthoo within this money, but it's not essential. Please tell me if this looks rubbish or if you've got any improvements.

Currently my basket looks like:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £850.95 (includes shipping: £0.00)
 
Sorry yeh forgot to mention current spec, but it's a i7-4790K
With all the costs there's really very little benefit from upgrading, when you have that quite high clock speed CPU.
Especially when new platform would be dead end for CPU upgrades.
And if you change monitor from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 that will put in relation lot more demand on GPU, with almost 80% more pixels per frame.

Intel's clock hasn't said properly tick or tock in years.
5th gen Broadwell was basically aimed for laptops.
6th gen Skylake was small architectural improvement.
7th gen Kaby Lake was Skylake with little tweaks and more clocks.
8th gen Coffee Lake is just Kaby Lake with more cores. And only because Ryzen forced Intel to increase core count for first time in decade.
Next respin of Skylake might be about hardware fixing at least some Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Intel needs that anyway for server markets.

CPU socket roulette is only thing which has been going tick-tock.
And you can bet your moneys that when ever (apparently later next year/2020) Intel brings out CPUs with actually upgraded architecture you'll again need new motherboard.

Intel simply took huge dive from that company genuinely pushing CPUs forward decade ago and have for years focused on milking consumers.
They even changed from soldering heatspreader to CPU die to using chewed bubblegum/toothpaste under heatspreader to penny pinch few cents higher profits.
Who knows if current toothpaste is any better:
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/31961441


At the same time developed in comparison with very limited resources, Ryzen is close to Intel's latest in anything, but the most heavily Intel favouring code...
While being held down by manufacturing process originally designed for lower clocks mobile products.
And current socket is going to be supported to 2020, allowing uprade path to improved by more resources/time Zen2 architecture CPUs.
With high performance optimized manufacturing process it's very likely going to surpass Intel's Skylake derivates.
Also instead of penny pinching for maximizing profits AMD solders heatspreader to CPU.
Myself seriously thinking about upgrade from 4770K to Ryzen because of that.
 
Back
Top Bottom