Worthwhile upgrade from i7 950

C

Colonel Sanders

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
5,615
I've been wanting to upgrade from my i7 950 (current OC is 3.90ghz, I like the much cooler temps there vs. 4.0ghz). The question is, would an upgrade to a gen 3 i7 (or maybe even i5) be worthwhile?

I'm thinking about a 3770k but I might be leaning towards a high overclock i5 3570k because the price is so much more attractive.

So, should I definitely be looking to upgrade or is the 950 plenty of power for now? I do almost nothing but gaming on this PC, including sims like Flight Simulator X which are incredibly CPU dependent.

Thanks for any advice!
 
Well, I did my own research and ending up buying an i5 3570k, an Asus Maximus V Gene, a Corsair H100 to cool it, and a Corsair 600t to hold everything. Can't wait :D
 
Colonel Sanders said:
Well, I did my own research and ending up buying an i5 3570k, an Asus Maximus V Gene, a Corsair H100 to cool it, and a Corsair 600t to hold everything. Can't wait :D
Click to expand...

I'm pretty much building this exact rig. Why did you end up picking sabertooth over the maximus gene v?
 
I am in the same boat, i7 950 at 4.0, but I have got a 2600k and a Biostar Z68 board coming tomorrow. I will post how they compare when I get it up and running probably Friday night.
 
Rogue_Apprentice said:
I am in the same boat, i7 950 at 4.0, but I have got a 2600k and a Biostar Z68 board coming tomorrow. I will post how they compare when I get it up and running probably Friday night.
Click to expand...

Unless you overclock the i7-2600K heavily, that CPU/Z68 platform will be barely an upgrade at all (performance-wise) to an i7-950/X58 platform.
 
I was an early adopter of a 920 and to be honest I dont think I'll be upgrading the CPU/Motherboard for a long time. Its still not a bottleneck in anything I do.
 
I have a i7-950 and i7-970 sitting side by side on X58 boards (both highly overclocked with excellent cooling solutions) and I keep populating the top-end IB or SB-E into Newegg wishlists (almost whimsically..) and configuring my next setup.

Then I sit back and actually think about it, and realize that the reason I'm so eager to upgrade is because in the past 15 years I've basically gone through this cycle of new mobo+cpu+ram every 1.5 years or so out of necessity because of the real-world gains I'd see from doing so.. so I feel the reason I keep getting the "itch" to build a SB-E or IB config is because I'm so used to having to upgrade habitally to alleviate CPU bottle-necking I've experienced in the past. Unfortunately upgrading from the 950 or 970 to a current gen processor is ultimately a cosmetic difference more than a functional one (for my purposes, plain gaming with no crazy encoding being done - I leave that to the HTPC), so I simply have to keep reminding myself it would be a waste of money and that I would be fiscally better off skipping a cycle to wait for the next processor lineup to come out (or, in this case, a full tick-tock entirely as it simply doesn't enthrall me to ditch my Gulftowns).

It sucks, my mind says YESDOITNOW but I know it would just be dropping $1500 for the sake of tinkering with cleaning out my case and re-building something new (and finally being able to take full advantage of the Vertex3 RAID0 I have, since I'm limited to SATAII I/O for the time being..). Fun to do, but I simply don't need to right now.

Now, if I could get my hands on a pair of 690's I might seriously consider spending money this product cycle, though I'm probably still better off waiting for the 700-series before upgrading my 580GTX tri-sli. But that's another story entirely..
 
Last edited:
I built a SB-E machine for a customer and I can tell you that it absolutely crushed my 950/X58 setup. I don't have the money for that upgrade however. But for you izusaga, if your on the fence, I know for a fact SB-E is worth it.
 
I am in the same situation as the OP. I have a OC'ed 920 and now on a 670GTX and it still does not bottleneck or anything of that nature.

Only reason why I want to drop the money is because SATA3 RAID and more PCIe 3.0 since they dont make boards for the first i7s anymore. That is almost enough for me to get a 3930k (low volt OC ftw..)

Decisions decisions..
 
Rogue_Apprentice said:
I built a SB-E machine for a customer and I can tell you that it absolutely crushed my 950/X58 setup. I don't have the money for that upgrade however. But for you izusaga, if your on the fence, I know for a fact SB-E is worth it.
Click to expand...

Worth depends on what you're doing, and how much disposable income you have on hand. I left my i7-950 for my SB setup this week, simply because I got the gear for a complete steal...No way I would have paid retail for it. UEFI is great, I get close to double the PPD at stock clocks, and I run a heck of a lot cooler (it is amazing how much heat the x58 PCH chip puts out)...Skyrim looks a bit prettier and runs better. But that is it. Nothing Earth shattering certainly nothing worth the $500+ entry price over an x58 setup IMHO.

PCIe2.0x16 isn't even maxed yet. In general, the price/performance of SB-E is terrible. It is awful in $/performance if folding or gaming...only if you need a massive 32GB RAM pool for workstation apps is it worth it.
 
The machine I built was for CAD and crunching 3D tool paths. However before I delivered it I put it through every bench/game I could. I know its a large dollar amount but this is [H] after all isn't it?.....;)
 
Rogue_Apprentice said:
The machine I built was for CAD and crunching 3D tool paths. However before I delivered it I put it through every bench/game I could. I know its a large dollar amount but this is [H] after all isn't it?.....;)
Click to expand...

Well you do have to "test" the toys to "make sure they work", right? :cool:
 
Rogue_Apprentice said:
I built a SB-E machine for a customer and I can tell you that it absolutely crushed my 950/X58 setup. I don't have the money for that upgrade however. But for you izusaga, if your on the fence, I know for a fact SB-E is worth it.
Click to expand...

Any additional details on this? I'm curious.

I pretty much just do 3D gaming on these systems - specifically RIFT. General things like Deus Ex, etc. How exactly did it crush the 950?
 
Okay first off all my testing was based on the 950 @ 3.8. The 3930k was paired with an AsRock Extreme 7 and was at stock clocks. Both machines had SSD although obviously the X79 was a SATA III drive. I was more concerned with CPU vs CPU. I took my 6970 and swapped between machines to keep that on the level as well.


I ran all the usual AIDA64 benchmarks X79 was 25 to 50% higher scoring except for CPU AES in which case it scored over 700,000 vs the 950s measly 47,000. I know these aren't in game or real world stuff but its a good place to start.

We then set up both machines and the customer's 2 dual Xeon Dells they just dropped 4k + on each and loaded up their most demanding file, shaded it then ran some cutter paths on it. The 3930k had it open, shaded and cutter path crunched before any other machine even pulled up the file....all while never breaking 20%.

I also used Handbrake to take a blue ray file and encode it to an MKV. The Green Zone. Normal profile.
3930k again came out on top by a good margin. Didn't write down actual times. Wish I had. But it was enough to make me wanna cry that I had to go back to my 950 to do this daily..

At home I ran BFBC2, BF3. While this was not the purpose of building this rig I wanted to see for myself how it did. BFBC2 saw minimal improvement but BF3 was a different story. In multiplayer I saw a 10 fps improvement in 1080p on ultra but not just that minimal fps was much better. With my 950 I'm constantly seeing spikes on the yellow in game CPU graph. Not with the 3930k. Just smooth as butter.

I know this isn't some scientific testing with graphs and charts but I'm no idiot either. I've built tons of i3 and i5 and i7 sandy rigs for customers and my best friend has a 2500k @4.4 paired with a 6970 and it left him saying, damn I want that, as well.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks for the reply. Most of those things aren't relevant to me for a system designed specifically for 3D gaming without utilizing significant multi-core support. As I mentioned, I have a specially built HTPC for encoding so I'm only concerned about legitimate real-world gaming improvements. When my current setup is easily pushing 80-100+ FPS on maxed settings on any game I play, I don't feel the jump to SB-E or IB would be worth it.
 
Your probably right. I think a GPU upgrade would make a more marked improvement. For what that X79 build was built to do for my customer they couldn't have been happier. The software they use allows them to assign cores to specific tasks so they really benefit from the 6 core and hyperthreading.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top