[SteveLord]

Originally Posted by storm-chaser

He clearly wants to simply upgrade his 775 to a better proc, is that too much to ask? So what he can get an 2500k for cheap he also needs a new motherboard new memory new heatsink etc etc, let him do what he wants.

What is up with you? He asked if anyone had a better idea and acknowledged newer hardware would have more headroom.

[Groov3st3r]

SO I haven't been here for a while, I see a heated discussion brewing :P

In a fairly near future, im most probably going off to Uni. For that, I will need to take out a loan - but not too much since ill live at home. The overheat that I will have left over looks.... pretty big. So assuming that this comes into fruition, I MIGHT just be able to pull off a new system rather than upgrade.

But bear in mind like its been said, that this will push me to get everything new and from scratch. I will need a new case, mobo, cpu, ram, gpu because I won't use a 5770 on a brand new setup, fans, drives, windows (oh joy) - the lot. Its a bit of a stretch.

Then again, looking at upgrading 775 as it is now, after some consideration, prices of 9550 are quite high and the ram that I need to pull it off anyway is both rare and expensive. DDR3 definitely has the edge, however I just don't know if it makes sense doing an upgrade and then going for an i5.
If I was doing that, I would prefer the i7, highly glorified and maybe overpriced and overrated but hyper threading does make a difference - having 8 useable threads instead of 4 as well as other little advantages.

The rig would be for gaming and mostly gaming. As it always was. I never played very demanding games but now all games are demanding.... bit of a bummer, my good old trusty PC can't cope. But I do also enjoy an occasional spot of 3D CAD, also with my upcoming uni course being about yacht and powercraft design I assume I will need something decent for rendering and 3D works.

Hmm, when you put it like that, the costly upgrade of 2 components doesnt sound so good anymore.



With regards to graphic cards, I would probably settle for a 7 series radeon, 7770 in crossfire or something similar as I am mostly looking for efficient performance and little consumption - total TDP would be around 160W when compared with many higher end cards using nearly double that but not always returning as much as 2 of these could. Thats only my opinion, I love the 5 series radeons since they are really up to a good standard, really solid cards making very good use of the energy fed to them unlike older but price-equivalent nVidias. Which are still more poweful but a lot more expensive and use too much energy imho.

[ivanlabrie]

Originally Posted by Groov3st3r

SO I haven't been here for a while, I see a heated discussion brewing :P

In a fairly near future, im most probably going off to Uni. For that, I will need to take out a loan - but not too much since ill live at home. The overheat that I will have left over looks.... pretty big. So assuming that this comes into fruition, I MIGHT just be able to pull off a new system rather than upgrade.

But bear in mind like its been said, that this will push me to get everything new and from scratch. I will need a new case, mobo, cpu, ram, gpu because I won't use a 5770 on a brand new setup, fans, drives, windows (oh joy) - the lot. Its a bit of a stretch.

Then again, looking at upgrading 775 as it is now, after some consideration, prices of 9550 are quite high and the ram that I need to pull it off anyway is both rare and expensive. DDR3 definitely has the edge, however I just don't know if it makes sense doing an upgrade and then going for an i5.
If I was doing that, I would prefer the i7, highly glorified and maybe overpriced and overrated but hyper threading does make a difference - having 8 useable threads instead of 4 as well as other little advantages.

The rig would be for gaming and mostly gaming. As it always was. I never played very demanding games but now all games are demanding.... bit of a bummer, my good old trusty PC can't cope. But I do also enjoy an occasional spot of 3D CAD, also with my upcoming uni course being about yacht and powercraft design I assume I will need something decent for rendering and 3D works.

Hmm, when you put it like that, the costly upgrade of 2 components doesnt sound so good anymore.



With regards to graphic cards, I would probably settle for a 7 series radeon, 7770 in crossfire or something similar as I am mostly looking for efficient performance and little consumption - total TDP would be around 160W when compared with many higher end cards using nearly double that but not always returning as much as 2 of these could. Thats only my opinion, I love the 5 series radeons since they are really up to a good standard, really solid cards making very good use of the energy fed to them unlike older but price-equivalent nVidias. Which are still more poweful but a lot more expensive and use too much energy imho.

Mate, I have some suggestions for you.
The I7 sounds good, you can get an Ivy bridge non K cpu and an H77 board.
That would do wonders for you. Or perhaps an I5 3550...
Gpu wise, I'd stick with Nvidia personally, but if you want AMD and power efficient stuff, get a 7850. It's cheap and really powerful when oced. -though not beastly-

[wingman99]

For gaming i would purchase the i5 3570k you don't need 8 threads for gaming. Most games only use 2-3 cores.

[azuza001]

I second wingman99's post, you don't need 8 threads for gaming. I run my I7 with Hyperthreading off so that I can OC it further without having to worry so much about heat. It does great.

As for the whole upgrade vs new system the Q9550 is still a very good gaming processor once you overclock it. Thats going to be the key point, overclocking. At 3.8 it pulls in the same FPS as my I7 870 at 3.2 Ghz with the same graphics card. But as I said before it would have to be cheap to make it worth it and I still say a full upgrade is what you want.


I would go with a good/cheap Z77 board, a Core I5 2500K or Core I5 3570K (whichever you can find cheaper), and probably something in the Radeon 7850 performance range and overclock the processor to a healthy 4Ghz and call it a day.

[ivanlabrie]

He has no time to tweak an OC going to Uni soon, and he said he intends to do some CAD work and 3d stuff...that screams I7 Ivy bridge non K.
Plus he would save on an aftermarket HSF too.
Re-read his post...

[freeagent]

The 9550 would be an awsome upgrade from the e6300. Once you get it over 3.4 its pretty decent.

[Groov3st3r]

Well you never know :P I won't be getting the loan till September, and that still has to be confirmed so any MAJOR spending is on hold for now.

Hmm, well my card seems solid for now, it does pull well although not as well as I would like it too, always wanting more :P I research the cards using HWCompare for data.
Judging from their comparisons, a 7850 as azuza001 mentioned, would be a much better card as it packs a bigger punch but doesn't use a lot more power than my current card.
Out of curiosity, how good is Radeon with CrossFire from your personal experience? If anyone knows?

Thing is, games tend to now get optimised to use 4 or more cores. Hyper threading would let me keep computer processes and game processes separate, leaving some room still for other miscellaneous tasks. I can go for i5 especially if that means less $$$, I jsut don't want to think like im missing out on extra performance to be had.

As for OC, I always have time for that It's not rocket science if you don't go hell-for-leather with it, just push it up and up and up. I got stuck with my current cpu at a measly 2.2ghz since the memory I have requires too large timings and isnt capable of any more no matter what voltage i put through it.

That extra 1.5x multiplier would help a bit, but I would not even be able to run it at stock speed with my current ram, an upgrade for like 120$ ram is needed as well to get to 3ghz - but once I reach that, Im confident it can do much more.

Alternatively, I need to find a mobo able to support a very loose CL7-CL8 even and go from there.

[Groov3st3r]

Um, a new option appeared.

This would be within a very low budget so I should be able to make it:

Get a 775 DDR3 motherboard - I found some really cheap ones, cheaper than the one I have currently that support more memory and fairly decent fsb settings
Then get cheap 8gb DDR3 1333, increase the memory speed and capacity greatly and make the current rig a bit more future proof. It should also open the doors for me to overclock my current E6300 that little bit extra and see how it goes untill I can swap it for a decent quad core.

All for less than 100$. Hmm, It would certainly see an improvement in performance wouldn't it? with more memory for heavy applications and faster memory with more bandwidth.

What do you guys say about that? Can you recommend boards and decent quality but cheap ram to fit?

[ivanlabrie]

Sounds like a plan.
Get Samsung 30nm ram (2x4gb cl11 1600 kit)
It's cheap, I have it and it does 2133 cl11 at 1.55v

(lo-profile ram sticks, there's a review at the main site)

[wingman99]

Gigabyte and Asus P45 boards are good they overclock well.

[azuza001]

Thats a trap that I've fallen into many times now lol. It's an option but keep this in mind.

On Socket 775 there really isn't any difference between DDR2 and DDR3 in terms of a boost going from one to the other.

Take a look at this as well.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=629566

This may give you an idea on a 3ghz E6300 vs a quad core at the same speed or even lower speed.

IF your going to stick with 775 I'd personally look at a Q6600 and stick with your current board if you can overclock on it. If you can't you can still do the Q6600 "electrical tape" mod to get it to run at 3.0Ghz which is a pretty nice boost over your E6300 (you didn't mention your speed, if it's default then defiantly a boost). I did that with a few Dell machines and it worked great.

You can get a Q6600 on Ebay for like 80$ or they appear here in the classifieds for 60-80$ once in awhile. Either way the Q6600 is a nice processor even now days (was the golden child of it's age) and can do a good job. I'd do that before buying a DDR3 board to OC your E6300 more.

You never mentioned how much you have to spend total on complete upgrades. How much do you want to spend max?

[ivanlabrie]

I'd insist on the futureproofing part...But well, sticking to 775 isn't wise in my eyes.
Even a cheap sandy bridge dual core with ddr3 ram and an h67 board would outperform the 775 setup you suggest. Perhaps he can get a p67 board in case he wants to oc with a better chip further on.

[azuza001]

It depends on what we're talking about. A cheap SB Dual will not beat a good Quad 755 in gaming. I own both a Q9550 and a Pentium G850 (SB derived processor) and while the G850 is a damn good little chip for it's price the Q9550 is still better. A Q6600 OCed to 3.0 is going to be very close to the Q9550 at default and if he can get the Q6600 up to 3.4 or 3.5 it's going to do a great job for the price. The low end SB's are pretty much stuck at their purchased speed.

For example, the Q9550 using a Geforce GTX 560 running at 3.6 will get an average fps of 47-60 in Deus Ex. The G850 running the same card will get 32-46 fps in the same settings/game. Still playable at 1080p maxed out but the Q9550 defiantly has the lead. And at the same speed there is pretty much no difference between the Q6600 and Q9550 in gaming.

It all comes down to how much he wants to spend. He could go with a low end Sandy, get a new Motherboard and Ram, and then upgrade again later. Or he could save more money now, go with a cheap Q6600, then upgrade next year when the new Intel Processors drop. Either way he's upgrading later but the question is how much and to what and when.

[ivanlabrie]

Yep, it all comes down to how much he wants to spend.
But for 775 he'll need to spend on a hyper 212+ too...I'd just rather get the newer stuff, which is upgradeable and will probably continue to work good for some years.
Look at all the i7 920 users still rocking those chips.
Plus, we don't know yet how good or overclockable or whatever the new Intel chips will be. (I mean Haswell, Ivy is good, but not too easily overclockable as we all know)
Just my 2 cents.

[QuickFast]

Originally Posted by azuza001

It depends on what we're talking about. A cheap SB Dual will not beat a good Quad 755 in gaming. I own both a Q9550 and a Pentium G850 (SB derived processor) and while the G850 is a damn good little chip for it's price the Q9550 is still better. A Q6600 OCed to 3.0 is going to be very close to the Q9550 at default and if he can get the Q6600 up to 3.4 or 3.5 it's going to do a great job for the price. The low end SB's are pretty much stuck at their purchased speed.

For example, the Q9550 using a Geforce GTX 560 running at 3.6 will get an average fps of 47-60 in Deus Ex. The G850 running the same card will get 32-46 fps in the same settings/game. Still playable at 1080p maxed out but the Q9550 defiantly has the lead. And at the same speed there is pretty much no difference between the Q6600 and Q9550 in gaming.

It all comes down to how much he wants to spend. He could go with a low end Sandy, get a new Motherboard and Ram, and then upgrade again later. Or he could save more money now, go with a cheap Q6600, then upgrade next year when the new Intel Processors drop. Either way he's upgrading later but the question is how much and to what and when.

+1
up graded from q6600 to i5 35700k and so far by 775 set up beats my 1155 set up(game benchmarks) at the same clocks might me my asrock ex6 z77-or os-vista64 or amd sh*t new drivers tried 12,4 and beta 12.6

[wingman99]

+2 my Q9550 ran the same FPS in my games with i5 2500 at the same clock speed. 3.8Ghz

[ivanlabrie]

Guys, don't forget that most games are gpu bound at certain resolutions.
What monitor/gpu you guys got?
I'm just leaving this here...

[Heke]

Q9550 ftw! I was in the same situation ~1 year ago and wanted to do a cheap upgrade because of BF3. Went for Q9550 and OC'd it to 3.8GHz + 560TI and bueno.

[azuza001]

As I said earlier I'm compairing the G850 to the Q9550 with a Geforce GTX 560 Non TI, a rather good mid range card. Groov3st3r never mentioned what card he has now but he did say he was thinking of 7770's in Xfire. A 7770 is a weaker card than a 560 by itself but crossfired it should be better. Problem is a 7770 Xfire with a G850 should be seriously bottlenecked as a G850 is bottelnecking a 560.