worth upgrading E8400 to Lynnfield?

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polonyc2

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I'm torn as to whether or not this will have any performance benefits...I only have a single GPU setup and don't plan on going SLI/Crossfire anytime in the near future...is there enough benefits to justify an upgrade from my current E8400 to any of the new Lynnfield i7's or even the i5?...I'm also not big on manual overclocking and would rather remain at stock while using the Turbo Mode to do any overclocking of my CPU...price is not an issue, I'm basically interested in raw performance benefits

have the Lynnfield i7's/i5 caught up to the Penryn dual core's in terms of a good gaming CPU?...or will it be better to upgrade my GPU with a new DX11 card over any CPU upgrade?
 
i would say yes. You got better o/c and better power efficiency and it's more powreful in i5/i7
 
GPU for games.. [duh], esp if you've been keeping up with rumors and speculation of how much more power the new cards will have over current generation's.

p.s. there are a lot of benchmarks regarding LGA1156 and gaming already. e.g. Anandtech.
 
Depends OP if your getting the most out of your e8400. Unless you play only StarCraft then it wouldn't be worth upgrading. lol.
 
the CPU has to factor in some time...can't keep upgrading the GPU all the time while keeping the E8400 for years can I?...there has to be a time when the CPU is worth upgrading for increased performance...so maybe the better question is how long can I possibly keep using the E8400 before I'm forced to upgrade?...another year?...2 years?...more?
 
polonyc2 said:
the CPU has to factor in some time...can't keep upgrading the GPU all the time while keeping the E8400 for years can I?...there has to be a time when the CPU is worth upgrading for increased performance...so maybe the better question is how long can I possibly keep using the E8400 before I'm forced to upgrade?...another year?...2 years?...more?
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You're talking about an E84, not P4.Upgrade your CPU when you have the itch, want e-peen, expand to programs that use >2 cores or when the CPU is bottlenecking. Who said you won't have to upgrade? You just asked DX11 card or i5.
 
how about listing what games you play and what resolution you use?

Probably will see everything from no gains up to small/medium gains. I would wait AT LEAST till next year when you can get USB 3 built in and the cpus will be cheaper and, more importantly, a larger selection of motherboards (also cheaper). Even then, it still might be better to wait till the following generation...
 
Based off the anandtech results, no there isn't a reason for you to upgrade. You will get higher average framerates (at stock) with lynnfield but no more than 20%, and in some games you get less minimum framerates.

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So in sum, Fallout3, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Wow, Sacred 2, Prototype all about the same. Dawn of War 2 about the same with the higher minimum frame rate being the e8600 (which your e8400 will perform about the same)

Only in Farcry2 did you see a big performance increase.
 
the biggest jump will be in terms of multitasking and multithreaded apps. the jump from 2 cores to 4 will be the biggest factor. if you mainly game, surf, and do offce stuff then you won't see much of a difference. if you're into video editing or want to run a bunch of programs at once then it might be worth it. it sounds like you have the itch, you might as well scratch it if it bothers you that much.
 
So theres not much reason for me to go for an i7 setup with my E8500 & 3.8ghz? I should probably just swap out my GTX 260 as it seems thats what games want more and more of, video card horsepower. I hardly do any rendering, mostly windows movie maker and only multiasking is multiple tabs of firefox. 90% of the PC's usage is gaming which is mostly Fallout 3, Champion Online and Company of Heroes at this point
 
I would leave your system exactly the way it is until you absolutely need it, no question. It should play close to everything at max settings with some headroom for the future.
 
CruisD64 said:
I would leave your system exactly the way it is until you absolutely need it, no question. It should play close to everything at max settings with some headroom for the future.
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I dunno, Company of Hero's, Far Cry 2, Crysis could always use more FPS with a nice, newer GPU.
 
Freezebyte said:
So theres not much reason for me to go for an i7 setup with my E8500 & 3.8ghz? I should probably just swap out my GTX 260 as it seems thats what games want more and more of, video card horsepower. I hardly do any rendering, mostly windows movie maker and only multiasking is multiple tabs of firefox. 90% of the PC's usage is gaming which is mostly Fallout 3, Champion Online and Company of Heroes at this point
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Even when you are using multiple tabs on firefox it is still single threaded and thus doesn't get any benefit from more than one core. Then again the other programs, including the os and antivirus would use your second core. In sum you don't need a quad core, go with the gpu.
 
Roland00 said:
Based off the anandtech results, no there isn't a reason for you to upgrade. You will get higher average framerates (at stock) with lynnfield but no more than 20%, and in some games you get less minimum framerates.

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So in sum, Fallout3, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Wow, Sacred 2, Prototype all about the same. Dawn of War 2 about the same with the higher minimum frame rate being the e8600 (which your e8400 will perform about the same)

Only in Farcry2 did you see a big performance increase.
Click to expand...
most of those settings are not what people would use with the gtx285 or even a gtx260. put all those games on realistic(high to very high) settings at 1920 and the E8400 will look even better.
 
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