- Sep 22, 2017
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Hello all, I am looking to upgrade my i7 950, I've had it for 7 years now and I do a fair bit of gaming and CFD and CAD work with my machine. Last year I upgraded to a 1060 6gb from a 460 (that was a huge shock haha). However, I ran some benchmarks (Firestrike mainly) and it seems that my 1060 is not performing as well other 1060's that are being reported. I believe the main issue is my CPU or possibly RAM speed and not cooling, as my case currently has x2 120mm fans on the CPU heatsink, x4 140mm fans intaking and exhausting, one extra 120mm and a pci-slot fan helping move air around internally. I spent a long time optimizing my fans and airflow, even adding in internal dividers, because the computer will often run at 100% load for 10-18hrs at a time. Here is a picture of my cpu cooler, a Prolimatech of some sort.
So I started researching on how to upgrade my CPU, and I learned that the LGA 1366 socket has long been superseded, and that my only upgrade would be to another i7-9XX model, with minimal performance gains. People say that the CPU will support overclocking quite well, and I do have a 750W PSU, but I ran into the term Instructions per Clock (or is it per Cycle?). It seems that with every successive generation of CPU's the IPC's rise. So, for example, if I *could* overclock my 950 to 4.2 Ghz (like the newer i7-7700k) my 950 still wouldn't keep up, because the newer CPU would be sending more instructions per clock right? And that's in addition to the increased power draw and cooling that overclocking would demand.
The other benefits to upgrading decreased power consumption across the board, faster memory (I'm stuck with ddr3 1066), and support for things like usb 3.0. I thought about upgrading to one of the new Ryzen chips for their extra cores; but I'm staying with Windows 7 and I read that when installing Ryzen + Win 7 that you had to do some funky stuff with loading the bios or something onto a flashdrive and booting from it first. And while I know how to do all the hardware changing side of things, I'm pretty weak on software. Then I looked into the LGA 1366 Xeons, but for the money spent, I'm not sure the gains would be totally worth it.
When I upgraded my GPU, I just slotted in the new card and when I booted back up Geforce Experience took care of autodownloading all the drivers and whatnot. My question about upgrading the CPU is what do I do once I install the new MoBo, CPU, Ram etc in my case? Do I fire it up and it just sorts itself out? I tried looking around, but most of the questions on here seemed more towards the physical side of things.
So, sorry for the long post, TLDR: What are IPC's and do advancements in them mean its worth upgrading to a newer generation CPU even if its the same clock speed as my current one?(assuming the number of cores/threads stays the same of course)
And two, what exactly do I do once I physically install the new CPU and supporting hardware, does it all take care of itself once I boot it up?
System specs: i7-950 + 12gb ddr3-1066 + EVGA X58 FTW3 Motherboard + PNY 1060-6gb
Windows 7 on SSD + 1tb HDD storage
So I started researching on how to upgrade my CPU, and I learned that the LGA 1366 socket has long been superseded, and that my only upgrade would be to another i7-9XX model, with minimal performance gains. People say that the CPU will support overclocking quite well, and I do have a 750W PSU, but I ran into the term Instructions per Clock (or is it per Cycle?). It seems that with every successive generation of CPU's the IPC's rise. So, for example, if I *could* overclock my 950 to 4.2 Ghz (like the newer i7-7700k) my 950 still wouldn't keep up, because the newer CPU would be sending more instructions per clock right? And that's in addition to the increased power draw and cooling that overclocking would demand.
The other benefits to upgrading decreased power consumption across the board, faster memory (I'm stuck with ddr3 1066), and support for things like usb 3.0. I thought about upgrading to one of the new Ryzen chips for their extra cores; but I'm staying with Windows 7 and I read that when installing Ryzen + Win 7 that you had to do some funky stuff with loading the bios or something onto a flashdrive and booting from it first. And while I know how to do all the hardware changing side of things, I'm pretty weak on software. Then I looked into the LGA 1366 Xeons, but for the money spent, I'm not sure the gains would be totally worth it.
When I upgraded my GPU, I just slotted in the new card and when I booted back up Geforce Experience took care of autodownloading all the drivers and whatnot. My question about upgrading the CPU is what do I do once I install the new MoBo, CPU, Ram etc in my case? Do I fire it up and it just sorts itself out? I tried looking around, but most of the questions on here seemed more towards the physical side of things.
So, sorry for the long post, TLDR: What are IPC's and do advancements in them mean its worth upgrading to a newer generation CPU even if its the same clock speed as my current one?(assuming the number of cores/threads stays the same of course)
And two, what exactly do I do once I physically install the new CPU and supporting hardware, does it all take care of itself once I boot it up?
System specs: i7-950 + 12gb ddr3-1066 + EVGA X58 FTW3 Motherboard + PNY 1060-6gb
Windows 7 on SSD + 1tb HDD storage
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