Upgrade from Core i7 870 to ??

[Gripen90]

I've been thinking of upgrading my nearly 1½ year old system to something new but I'm unsure which platform and specs will makes best sense within a fairly restricted budget.

The setup I've been looking at primarily is

Intel® Core i7-3820 Processor Socket-LGA2011, Quad Core, 3.6Ghz, 10MB, Boxed, no fan included

MSI X79A-GD45, Socket-2011 ATX, X79, 4xDDR3, 3xPCIe(3.0)x16, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.0, UEFI

Totalling around 3500 Danisk kroner or USD $625 or £393.

The only "demand" is a motherboard that has 3-way-SLi support in a dual-slot layout, so I can reuse my GTX 580s. I assume I can reuse my 16GB 1333Mhz Ram too ?

I don't have any overclocking in mind.

Some say I'd be better of with a socket 1155 setup with a z77 motherboard and a Intel® Core i5-3570K Processor or Intel® Core i7-3770K Processor ? however such a solution is a bit more expensive than the one I've looked at.

Others tell me I should wait upgrading till 2013 since the Core i7 870 provides enough steam.

I'd appreciate any advice to what would be the most "sensible" upgrade both regarding price/performance.

 

[cmndr_andi]

As you probably understand - you have a rather nice CPU, but the P55 + NF200 board is likely to bottleneck the performance of your 3 x GTX 580 graphics setup.

If you do want to upgrade then I would agree that the LGA2011 / X79 is the best option for you - since it offers much more PCIE lanes for your triple graphics setup. The X79 can provide up to 40 PCIE lanes, while the Z77 can only provide 16 lanes natively (and the Z77 boards that use a bridging chip like your current board cost a lot more and are not as good as a X79 for the task). Going for an X79 board also means you can upgrade to hex core and Ivy Bridge E CPUs in the future without changing the board, it also natively supports PCIE gen3 - so with newer graphics cards that support this bandwidth you will have twice again the PCIE bandwidth (since PCIE gen3 has twice the bandwidth per lane of PCIE gen2).

Your budget should afford you a nice x79 board like this one (review here) and a quad core Sandy Bridge E CPU like this i7 3820.

Your existing Corsair XMS3 RAM should work fine - just make sure you set the DRAM voltage to 1.5V.

 

[Gripen90]

Thank you for the answer
The memory modules are 1.5v so that shouldn't be an issue.

I've looked around and it seems like an X79 setup would be the best long term option for me. It should at least fullfill most work & gaming needs within 1½-2 years time - kinda like the current setup.

That Asrock motherboard definitely deserves a closer look