Trying to breathe more life into a 5 year old i7 980x workstation.

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pdxgfx

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Feb 9, 2010
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I'm trying to breathe a year (or two if I'm lucky) of life into my 5 year old After Effects animation system. It's no slouch:

Intel i7 980x CPU
24 GB DDR 3 1333 RAM
256GB SSD SATA 6 System Drive
3TB Media Drive
GTX 580 1.5 TB
Gigabyte USB 3 X58 Motherboard
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.

I'm looking into thinking of overclocking this CPU (have tried in the past but I've chickened out since stability is a must in my business). I am also slowed down by the SATA 3 chipset built in on the board. Two of my PCI Ex expansion slots are taken by a wireless networking card and a sound card (the one on the board is fried). I'm short the cash this year for the computer upgrade I was planning (about $3k budget). Any ideas?
 
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Idonno
You can overclock your 980x (that is what it was made for) quite a bit and still have a completely stable system. All systems are not created equal and even the same components can vary a bit when it comes to overclocking.

My 980x is 100% stable at 4.33GHz but, any 980x should be able to reach at least 4GHz and be 100% stable with the right settings and aftermarket CPU cooler.

Your Graphics card and ram could be upgraded and if your SSD is as old as your build that could be definitely be upgraded.
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Anarkie13

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A new GPU would be of great assistance in your situation. You have plenty of clock speed and cores with that processor. The only major gains will be in an upgraded GPU (which you can transfer to the next build), and possibly a 1TB SSD for immediate working storage, turning the 3TB drive to an archive drive.

Change the GPU to a 980Ti or AMD Fury X, and you'll see the most gain, I'm sure.
 
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datguy20

datguy20

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Nov 6, 2013
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If stability is a big concern, you can always just do a looooot of stability testing. Like 20 passes of the highest setting on IntelBurnTest.

Guessing you'd just need a good CPU cooler to max out the OC on it, and maybe get some Quadro/FirePro card (depending on budget).
 
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pdxgfx

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I know right now with the 256GB SSD (Samsung EVO 840) that it takes Windows almost 1:45 to boot that I'm running into the SATA 3 overhead. I haven't had any experience putting in an expansion card HDD controller like a SATA 6, would that show a marked improvement in speed I wonder? I would love a 1TB SSD but I've had editing projects sport sizes over 2 TB in footage (including renders and revisions, 4K source footage is a massive load) so I would be better served in making a RAID enclosure work for something like that.
 
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Idonno

Idonno

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You can overclock your 980x (that is what it was made for) quite a bit and still have a completely stable system. All systems are not created equal and even the same components can vary a bit when it comes to overclocking.

My 980x is 100% stable at 4.33GHz but, any 980x should be able to reach at least 4GHz and be 100% stable with the right settings and aftermarket CPU cooler.

Your Graphics card and ram could be upgraded and if your SSD is as old as your build that could be definitely be upgraded.
 
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