i7-950 OC'd upgrade?

Should I upgrade?

  • Upgrade

    Votes: 4 50.0%

  • Don't upgrade

    Votes: 1 12.5%

  • Balls

    Votes: 3 37.5%
  • Total voters
    8
S

Siriso

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2009
Messages
212
My computer is the center of my entertainment, which includes gaming, and file serving to other devices the house (no transcoding).

i7-950 d0 4.0Ghz running at 1.248v for ...6 years+
Custom loop with a dedicated 360mm rad to itself
Asus RIII Formula
12G (3x4) Corsair XMS3 2000 at modest 1740Mhz at 1.6v, never got it stable near 2000 at 1.65v even at default xmp
120Gb Vertex3 for OS and games of the moment.
GTX 1080

This thing is still running like a champ but...

I've go the upgrade bug and I'm somehow out of USB3.0 endpoints(so it seems from the "out of resources" message) for the onboard USB 3 controller. If I don't upgrade I'm buying PCIe USB 3 card.

Should I upgrade? Budget will be built around a system with a cpu cost of ~$500 and 16-32G of ram and a good OC enthusiast level MB, new, fast, small capacity(to save $$) SSD (for OS) and new 1TB SSD for game installs. Potential new rig will also be on water. I'll probably keep the 1080 for a generation or two.
Preference to Intel CPUs and Asus boards, but open to suggestions if you think I should branch out again.

I've posed this question to these forums before and took the advice to wait it out for the next generation. I think that was two generations ago.

So [H], help me decide if I should just push the OC a little more for funsies and upgrade if I fry, keep chugging with what I got, or upgrade (and to what?).

Thanks in advance!
 
With the prices of DDR4 RAM (Have you looked recently?) my answer to that is no. Don't bother upgrading. Just grab a USB 3.1 card and keep riding on that CPU until DDR4 prices come back down.

16GB of DDR4 is going to be half of your budget. 32GB is going to be all of your budget basically.
 
Yeah I noticed that the prices were pretty high compared to last time I was looking. The ~$500 budget was JUST the processor allotment.
 
Those USB controllers pre-Sandy Bridge era are pure poison. Turn it off in the BIOS and pretend it doesn't exist.

Last thing you need is some Marvell controller mucking up the works etc.

Get yourself a USB pci-e card.

If you've got the upgrade bug, double your DDR3 RAM and get a bigger/newer SSD.
 
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I was running a W3690 Xeon with 32GB as my main box and I just installed powered external USB hubs from Anker to solve my USB issues. However, my motherboard finally had a heart attack Rampage Extreme III so I did upgrade. I put a Ryzen 1800X on the ASUS Crosshair Hero VI with 64GB of DDR4 together. I also put the CPU under water and it runs at 4.1GHZ for the 8 core. Getting the ram speeds up on Ryzen with 64GB is very.. very hard. I've only managed 2,666 on my 3200. Word of warning if you go Ryzen the ram will hate you so you better be unbelievably picky about which ram you buy.
 
Well if you have $500 for just the processor then go for the upgrade!
 
This is entirely up to you, so my vote is balls?

The thing is, you haven't identified any reason other than "I have the upgrade bug", if you can't get over it and you can comfortably afford it, go for it.

If you can come up with things that this computer currently cannot do or cannot do well enough, that could support your reasoning to do this.
 
I can't really come up with a compelling reason to upgrade other than my USB 3 woes. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking some new feature or life changing performance gap. For my 1440p gaming, I have no complaints.

Took the advice to buy a USB 3 card, a 1tb 850EVO, and tossed in another 12g of ram I had laying around. All set up to skip another generation.

Thank you all for the input, I'll probably be back with the same question in a year or two, hehe :D.
 
Something else to consider with older boxes is how painful would an it just stopped working forced upgrade be?

The older of my 2 LGA1366 systems (bought a few weeks after the i7-920 came out) died 2 summers ago, after ~7 years of use. The newer one (i7-930 from mid 2010) is still alive, but is only a few months past the point when the old one croaked.
 
A really cheap CPU upgrade is throwing in an X5600 series Xeon. You'll pickup 4 extra threads and more overclocking room. Many of the X5600 Xeons do 4Ghz on default voltage or undervolted even. With a good water setup 4.4-4.6Ghz is very doable. You can pickup an X5680 for $50-60 or an X5675 for even less.

I don't think enough good things can be said about the X58 platform though. Almost a decade old and still performing well for today's tasks and games for many people.
 
I'm surprised the Xeon's are that much cheaper than the equivalent i7's. I looked ebay prices for a 970, saw something a few times higher (still >$100 today), and decided to pass on an extra cores upgrade.
 
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