Is it time to upgrade?

[mgholson]

Hi guys,

My HD 7850 GPU died this week. It has identical red artifacts in every PC I tested it on and will crash the system after a few minutes. Bought a GTX 1050 Ti to replace it.

So my PC is a
i5 2400
Gigabyte H67 D2 B3
10 GB RAM
240GB SSD
2 Hard Drives

I also have a Core 2 Duo OC'd to 3.1 Ghz with a 10 year old 500GB RAID array and only 2GB of ram hooked up to my TV that we watch everything on. It seems to do fine but can't play 1080p 60. I think it really needs an upgrade, but it works really well.

I don't really game anymore, every now and again I'll try something out and I ride ZWIFT a 3D bike trainer which doesn't need much power.

My primary use is Premier and Photoshop. Spend lots of time in both.

After cracking open the case for the first time in a long time I'm thinking of upgrading. I watched a video the other day about overclocking xeon processors on X58. I've also been looking at building Ryzen 5 2600 system. I'm just in a mood to tinker and experiment with a PC right now.

But I keep asking myself, do I even need to upgrade? I don't have a USB 3.0 port and I'm spending alot of time transferring video files. The thing is I haven't used a computer more powerful then mine and I don't have any computer geek friends anymore showing off their high end builds. Thanks for any advice!

 

[Vishera]

Could you get by for a few more years? Absolutely. There's another 2 or 3 years left in your system, easily. However, you have to look at quality of life. Rendering video on a Ryzen 5 2600 will be much faster than on an i5-2400. DDR4 will make a small, perhaps unnoticeable, difference as well. If I were you, I'd retire the 2400 system to the living room, ditch the C2D system altogether, and build a Ryzen system for your rendering. However, it's worth noting that new AMD CPUs (the 3000 series) are coming this summer. If you can ride with your system a little longer, the replacement for the 2600 might be even better. 7nm, potentially more cores, higher clock speed, etc.

In case you decide to bite the bullet, here's a system I threw together in a few minutes: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tVGpvn

I assumed you would be re-using your case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and any other miscellaneous peripherals, but I suggest replacing the power supply depending on how old it is. You can never be too careful. I also included two different RAM kits of differing sizes, 32GB and 64GB, for you to pick from. Just delete the one you wouldn't see yourself buying. If you have any other questions, feel free to put another comment down and I'll see if I can help at all.

 

[DaPoets]

An upgrade will noticeably help you if you're in Premier and photoshop a lot especially w/ only 10GB of ram... Just turning on my PC and opening Chrome I'm at 8GB used (a lot of background apps load at startup for me). 8th gen i3 processors are cheap as hell if cost is an issue so you could go w/ a z370 mother board (or z390 for future upgrades), ram prices and SSD prices have dropped a lot too.

Basically you would need to upgrade the Motherboard, Ram, Processor, Powersupply (yes be ahead of the fail game). You could do all this for around $400 w/ out searching too hard on the intel side of things. I'm not familiar w/ the AMD costs these days but they tend to be a better value in many areas as well.

 

[mgholson]

Well good news, When I bought my new 1050 Ti, I went ahead and bought a new 700w Thermaltake PSU to replace the 430 watt that had been in there for 5+ years. The original PSU was the last part I had fail and that was a long time ago.

Price is sort of an issue. I just spent 200, but I think I could get away with a few hundred more.

When I built this i5 2400 I only bought 4GB of Ram and ran dual channel. I bought a 8 GB stick and now am no dual channel but 10GB of total ram seems to be way better then 4 LOL. Will look into z390 motherboard.

 

[trents]

With the apps you are running, you are correct that more RAM trumps dual channel.

 

[mgholson]

I fly FPV and use a simulator, Liftoff, and edit video several times a week with Premier, and use photoshop almost daily with Nik filters. My wife is a hardcore instagram reviwer and I do alot of her product photography.

I usually build a new system about every 5 years or so, but I've had this i5 for around 6 years now.

 

[wingman99]

What is your budget?

 

[mgholson]

That's a complicated question for me. My budget in anything I do is always the smallest amount I can spend to achieve my desired goal. My current goal is a more responsive system in photoshop and premier. Faster rendering time would be a big plus.

Also would like to be able to transfer large video files faster.

I could spend alot if I had too, but I feel like I could spend 300-400 dollars and see a huge improvement, so that's the amount I'm looking a when I started thinking of doing a Ryzen 5 2600 and DDR4. But I thought it might be more interesting and way cheaper to try to OC an older CPU. since I don't game any more I'm thinking more cores, and that's one reason I was thinking of trying to OC an xeon x5650 or something.

 

[wingman99]

I would not spend money on outdated technology for just a little improvement with overclocking. It's about 2% improvement for every 100mhz overclock very small amount.

 

[trents]

I would not spend money on outdated technology for just a little improvement with overclocking. It's about 2% improvement for every 100mhz overclock very small amount.

This. Good guidance here. If I were you I would start looking into building an AMD Ryzen system because of the bang for the buck. With the computing tasks you outline, all those cores found in, for instance, a Ryzen 5 2600 would give a huge boost in performance. You would need DDR 4 RAM as well if you went that route.

 

[mgholson]

A few options I'm thinking about.

Ebay junk 1: Dell t3600 workstation upgraded to E5 2660 and came with around 250 bucks to build an 8 core with 32GB of DDR3

ebay junk 2: Buy a i7 2600k around 125 bucks for about twice as much CPU performance

Amazon new system 3: Ryzen 7 1700, Gigabyte B350, 16GB DDR4, 330 dolllars all with magical amazon warranty.

 

[trents]

The Amazon option. No brainer. Don't go backwards to DDR3 era technology.

 

[mgholson]

OK thanks everyone so much for the help, another question.

R7 1700 vs. R6 2600 both are 169 right now.

B350 vs. B450 about 50 bucks difference.

 

[wingman99]

Purchase the R7 1700 and the B350. That setup has the most performance for the money.

 

[trents]

Yes.