New i7 System or wait for Sandy Bridge?

[Speedo68]

Hey Guys,

I want to ugprade one of my lesser gaming PCs. But, don't know if I want to go i7 route. Or, wait till sandy bridge next year. PC runs great, just like to keep current gear in my gaming rigs. I will have several friends over for XMAS break for LAN Gaming and such.

Listing current specs and what I was looking at various places (NewEgg, MicroCenter, ZipZoomFly, Frys).

And no, $$$ is not an object have up to $3k to spend if I want to. Keeping Velocoraptors/Intel X25M G2s from current builds. All my PC have corsiar 850w or better PSUs. Will reuse case BR-DVD-RWs and other accessories.

OLD PC #1

QX9650 running at 3.6ghz
Asus P5E3 Premium
4gb OCZ DDR3
Single 280GTX

OLD PC #2

E8400 running at 3.6ghz
Gigabyte EP45-DS3R
4fb OCZ DDR2
X-Fire 4890

And, possible upgrade IDK yet. Upgarding this PC either now or by Mar next year

i5-750 running at 3.4Ghz
EVGA P55 FTW
4gb Corsair Dominator DDR3
X-Fire 5850

All good PCs, but like to keep all my gaming PCs up to date with gear. Play alot of FPS, MMO, RTS. These also Fold if they are turned on. Have several monthly gaming events and everyone can use a great PC. Down to 7 gaming PCs. Economy has forced me to sell 3 already . (wife actually, but economy seems the right thing to say now)

Looking at either of these upgrades:

i7 - 975 or 980
Asus P5X58D-E
8gb DDR3
either 6970 or 580 GTX when released
or
i7-875K
Gigabyte P55-UD5 or UD7 idk just yet-maybe Asus instead
8gb DDR3
either 6970 or 580 GTX when released

I will be upgrading 2 PCs, maybe 3. But, could wait on my i5 PCs(3 atm). I do know I will be building at least 2~3 Sandy Bridge PCs and at least 1 Bulldozer AMD when released.

Just wanting some advise as to upgrade those 2 PCs now? or wait till like Feb/Mar of next year for Sandy Bridge and it's goodness.

 

[scaarbelly]

those are 2 nice setups. If you can sell them to pay for an upgrade now, do it before they lose too much value. Otherwise, wait, you still have very fast systems.

 

[Shamb1es]

They are both good machines. I'd wait for sandy bridge if all this 5Ghz+ on air pans out on the unlocked chips.

 

[Shadowthor]

Depends if you want to wait for sandy bridge LGA 2011 or LGA 1155 (that's coming out at the end of the year, i think). Otherwise as previous post mention, there are both nice setups.

 

[Forceman]

Given that those two "old" systems are pretty capable, I'd definately wait for SB 1155 to come out early next year. Pretty significant performance improvements over the current i series.

 

[harpoon]

Hang on to them until Sandy Bridge arrives. You can upgrade the GPUs in the meantime for a bit more gaming punch this Xmas, they'll be bottlenecked to an extent (not so much the QX9650, but the E8400 will be in quad optimised games like BC2) but its not like you're gonna hang on to the systems for much longer.

 

[Skull_Angel]

if you really feel the need, I'd suggest upgrading the E8400 system to the i5 750, but there's no real reason to. even with SB coming out both those systems you currently have will be pretty capable for quite a while with how "quickly" most gaming development is "evolving", haha.

with gaming in mind, the only real reason to upgrade would be to enjoy larger monitors (or multi-monitors) and higher resolutions with all the eye candy.

 

[TheWeazmeister]

Hang on to them until Sandy Bridge arrives. You can upgrade the GPUs in the meantime for a bit more gaming punch this Xmas, they'll be bottlenecked to an extent (not so much the QX9650, but the E8400 will be in quad optimised games like BC2) but its not like you're gonna hang on to the systems for much longer.

^^This IMO as well

 

[radaja]

just wait for SB see how they are and priced,and if you like what you see then go for it
but if you dont you can get a cheap 1156 or 1366 setup,win win for you

 

[Speedo68]

Yeah, I want to be able to play all new games at higher resolution. Those gaming PCs # 5 #6 are running a single Dell 27" LCD at 1440x900 but want to go to 1600x1200. Might setup Dual 27" LCD. Have a couple extra monitors in the garage.

As for upgrading. I will be upgrading 3 PCs to Sandy Bridge when they release. They are i5-750 or i7-920 PCs OCed in the 4~4.2 ghz range. I do have a bad habit of upgrading. But my brothers/brother-in-law like getting my hand-me-downs. So will get in on the SB bandwagon for sure.

It's just I havent seen too much benchmarking on Sandy Bridge and would like to know difference between those setups I listed.

Anyone see any newer benchmarks yet?

Cheers

 

[harpoon]

Anyone see any newer benchmarks yet?

Cheers

Apart from SuperPi runs at XS, which are pretty much meanlingless (to me anyway) not really... all we got to go by are the results from Anandtech, although we can expect performance to increase a few % from those results as the SB chips didn't have a functioning turbo mode. General consensus amongst the enthusiast community is a general 10 - 15% IPC increase plus increased headroom into the ~5GHz range on air... which equates to a ~40% performance increase overall compared to current i5/i7 chips. Definitely worth waiting a couple of months for I'd say!