When will i7 970 drop in value / when to upgrade?

[dandragonrage]

I have an i7 970 Gulftown now. I want to upgrade to something with higher IPC and lower power, so obviously Sandy Bridge, and I'm hopeful that Bulldozer will also qualify. I don't care if I lose 2 cores (6->4).

Should I sell the 970 immediately or is it going to keep the same value for a while? I want to be efficient with my money here.

 

[Insomniator]

I would guess it would hold value for a while. A lot of people spent good money on 1366 boards and will want powerful chips for them. Plus for the time being 1366 is still the most versatile platform PCI E wise no?

 

[Dan_D]

As with most things which depreciate value, the sooner you sell the more valuable it will be.

I would guess it would hold value for a while. A lot of people spent good money on 1366 boards and will want powerful chips for them. Plus for the time being 1366 is still the most versatile platform PCI E wise no?

Yeah, LGA1366 as a platform is a bit more versatile in terms of PCIe lanes but that's all it has going for it over P55 / P67 etc.

 

[jeremyshaw]

The likelyhood of Intel dropping prices on old parts is about... nil. They'll simply axe the top tier parts from existance. But as Dan_D stated, parts do depreciate. I'd expect 550 to be actual resell price, now (since a few members did sell them at that price...)

 

[dandragonrage]

As with most things which depreciate value, the sooner you sell the more valuable it will be.

All right, thanks. I'll (try to) sell it now, then.

 

[Dan_D]

All right, thanks. I'll (try to) sell it now, then.

I'm not sure why you would. Gulftown and Sandy Bridge are pretty close performance wise with Gulftown kicking it's ass if the application makes use of the additional processor cores. It isn't as if the lower power of Sandy Bridge will impact your electric bill a whole lot. The only saving grace here is that you can probably sell that Gulftown chip for enough money to pay for a Sandy Bridge processor and motherboard of your choice. I think what's really going on here is that you have upgradeitis and you are justifying switching hardware through virtually any means possible. If you've got a Gulftown setup, Sandy Bridge isn't really all that compelling. Hell it's not compelling for decently overclocked Core i7 9xx users to switch to or even Core i7 8xx series owners to switch to. It's an evolutionary step forward, not a revolutionary one. You probably won't even see a compelling reason to switch until Ivy Bridge comes along and even then I'm not so sure. It may not be until we see successors to Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge before we see a truly compelling performance worth upgrading for.

I think you are caught up in Sandy Bridge being the most advanced processor on the market and are losing touch with reality. P67 has fewer PCIe lanes, about 30% less memory bandwidth and aside from supporting SATA 6G natively, it's got nothing on X58. Even then it supports SATA 6G on only two ports. Even then a well implemented Marvell 9128 can just about match it. You'll see that soon in an upcoming review. Most companies do not implement Marvell 9128 controllers well, but when they do it's actually pretty good.

We don't know when Bulldozer will come out and all indications are that right now they are targeting matching Nehalem's performance. Not Gulftown, and not Sandy Bridge. I think it may be a compelling server solution, but on the desktop side, not so much. Sandy Bridge again just doesn't have much on Gulftown so it just seems like a lot of effort for what is essentially a sideways upgrade and in some areas, a significant downgrade. I'd stick with what you have for now.

 

[dandragonrage]

I'm not sure why you would. Gulftown and Sandy Bridge are pretty close performance wise with Gulftown kicking it's ass if the application makes use of the additional processor cores.

I need single-threaded performance most of all. IPC is far, far, far more important than cores.

Besides, I'll gain some pocket money and my computer will use less electricity... my bills are killer.

 

[Dan_D]

I need single-threaded performance most of all. IPC is far, far, far more important than cores.

Besides, I'll gain some pocket money and my computer will use less electricity... my bills are killer.

Again IPC with Sandy Bridge isn't that much greater. Due to the differences in platforms such as triple channel memory, etc. at 4.4GHz Gulftown beats Sandy Brdige most of the time at the same clock speed. So again my question is why bother? Power savings won't even net you something you'd notice on your electric bills. When I went from a single monitor to 3 monitors, and went from a single Radeon HD 5970 to dual GeForce GTX580's in SLI, my power usage went up at least 180 watts just in monitors. My wattage on video cards probably went up by at least 100 watts. My 5970 was overclocked to 5870 speeds which brings the TDP upward to about 400 watts. TDP for the GTX 580's is around 250 watts each give or take. I didn't notice any change in my electric bill. The difference in wattage between Sandy Bridge and Gulftown isn't nearly as much of a difference as what I saw in my upgrades. If I didn't see any significant change in my electric bill, you won't either.