Thinking about going i7 but not sure.

[Ixon]

I currently have a Q9500 sat at 3.6Ghz, 4gig of Crucial Ballistix DDr2 800 4-4-4-12, Gigabyte X48 DQ6 & a nice new lovley Radeon 5870.

Now i've just benched this setup with the card on stock on 3D mark 06 & got 20.4k

Now ive been thinking of going i7 at the end of the month, but not sure if it worth spending best part of £500 on new parts when my current setup is still pretty fast.

I don't want to upgrade just for upgrading sake unless i see a decent increase in performance from the CPU.

I mainly game on this PC, but also do a lot of photo editing in CS4 & Lightroom,maybe the i7 would be better for this, but the Q9550 is no slouch neither when it comes to using editing software.

So do you think the i7 & £500 expense is worth it over my Q9550?

 

[namnoc]

You don't say what your disk is, but if you don't have one already the most noticeable increase would be an SSD.

 

[Ixon]

Just 640gig WD SATA2 16meg cache

 

[yashiro]

So do you think the i7 & £500 expense is worth it over my Q9550?

No.

 

[Phage]

Not yet.
+1 SSD though.

 

[capriboy1978]

i'd agree. i7 for me as a complete new build having sat out the c2q was a no brainer. Unless you can sell it on for good money sit back and enjoy.

 

[Sindri]

If the ssd option is too expensive you could always go for a raid configuration. But i agree with the others i would wait til next gen cpus come out.

 

[hardtarget]

So do you think the i7 & £500 expense is worth it over my Q9550?

No! Stick with what you have and spend your money on an SSD.

 

[BIGBC]

I went from a Q9550 at 3.4GHz to my i7 at 4GHz but it only cost me £150 due to selling on older stuff. There is a noticeable difference when stressing the systems, but even when playing games the i7 throttles down to 1.8-2.6GHz. Its really not needed unless your doing some serious work loads.

note: my i7 hits 55000 on 3D mark vantage.

 

[Mrjobby]

Weigh up what you can sell your current gear for then think is it worth 200-250 on top to have some new toys?

 

[Nocky24]

If the ssd option is too expensive you could always go for a raid configuration. But i agree with the others i would wait til next gen cpus come out.

When will that be? I'm in the exact same position with my q9550 to be honest, does everything i want it to ok, just want new stuff!