What was your System before Core I7?

[one-shot]

I'm wondering what systems(CPU/Chipset) people upgraded from before their current Core i7 Rig.

I'm currently looking to build a new PC for college this fall and would like some insight from others. Thanks.

 

[shiftstealth]

I just upgraded from a phenom II 940

 

[halcyon]

I upgraded from a Q9450. ...which is now dedicated to other stuff.

 

[cjl]

I upgraded from a laptop with a T7600G Core 2 Duo and an Nvidia Geforce 7950GTX. It was a bit of an upgrade

 

[dragonfang18]

The laptop I am using now, before that it was an Alienware Desktop before Dell acquired it...

Laptop has an AMD Turion 64, I didnt know that if I waited a month, alienware would have come out with a intel dual core back then... I didnt know how to build PC's back then too...

 

[tobensg]

Core I7 is way too expensive at the moment, so Im sticking with my OC'd E8400 (3.8Ghz) and ATI4870 1Gb.

 

[one-shot]

Good to hear from the responses so far. Does anyone have a DO stepping i7 920 at all? Also, I have a P35-DS3L and an E6750 @ 3.7Ghz for my motherboard/cpu.

 

[dragonfang18]

As soon as My i7 get delivered to my house I'll check if it is D0.

 

[Helloworld_98]

^it should be if you ordered from a major retailer.

 

[dragonfang18]

Oh Good... Thats a load off my back Yay newegg!

 

[one-shot]

Oh Good... Thats a load off my back Yay newegg!

I'm actually holding off of getting my own Core i7 920 because of fear of a C0 stepping. Some recent reviews have reported receiving the C0 instead of the D0 stepping :S. So, I guess we'll all wait and see.

 

[dragonfang18]

You get what you get... Anyway I dont care, as soon as something better gets out I will switch. I mean "look at" me right now, as long as I can OC the damn thing to 3 Ghz I am REALLY happy , than the 2Ghz single core Turion 64 that I am using now!

 

[jaguarskx]

I'll wait for the next gen before upgrading from my Q9450 system which is only about 10 months old.

 

[halcyon]

I'll wait for the next gen before upgrading from my Q9450 system which is only about 10 months old.

That's smart. My i7 @ 3.5Ghz is not noticably faster than my Q9450 @ 3.4Ghz.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

From an E8600 @ 4.8 Ghz with a 4870 X2 to an i7 920 @ 4.2 Ghz with 2 4870 X2s in crossfire, it was a small upgrade.

 

[Wanny]

I bought my i7 last week in Canada and it was a D0. Quite surprising.

I was on a Pentium 4 3.4 HT before...

 

[djc604]

Q6600, 4870 1GB, 4GB RAM, 22" monitor, Vista 64-bit.

 

[one-shot]

From an E8600 @ 4.8 Ghz with a 4870 X2 to an i7 920 @ 4.2 Ghz with 2 4870 X2s in crossfire, it was a small upgrade.

Great, now I won't feel so bad for ditching my E6750 @ 3.7Ghz.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Ha, loved the E6750. A E6750 @ 3.6 will still hang with the big boys today and it is an old CPU.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I'm wondering what systems(CPU/Chipset) people upgraded from before their current Core i7 Rig.

I'm currently looking to build a new PC for college this fall and would like some insight from others. Thanks.

Heh, "what did you run before your Core i7 rig." I currently run a state-of-the-2005-art socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 4 GB DDR-400 as my main machine. I know it is many generations behind what most people have here, but it gets along well enough for me and I will run it for another year or so until I finally get out of school and can buy a new one. My Dell Latitude notebook is a lot newer as it is only about a half a year old, but it is a low-end unit with a 65 nm Core 2 Duo T7250 and 3 GB of DDR2 running at 667 MHz. I didn't need much more than a basic notebook as this is solely a machine to take to lectures and take tests with. It works perfectly for that purpose and I can't argue with the price (about $650 tax paid and shipped!) nor the build quality. It is a heck of a lot better build quality than the 2002-vintage Gateway P4-M unit it replaced, plus it was about two grand less. That's progress for you!

Many people here had the following list of upgrades during that time period:

- 65 nm Core 2 Duo- usually the E6300 or E6600.
- 65 nm Core 2 Quad Q6600
- 45 nm Core 2 Quad Q9xxx series or Core 2 Duo E8400-8600
- 45 nm Phenom II or Core i7

I also run two systems rescued from the dumpster, an Athlon XP 3200+ with 1 GB DDR-400 and a Pentium III Coppermine 1.0B with 256 MB PC100 SDRAM. The Athlon XP is my HTPC and the PIII is my file/print server. Those machines work well for their intended purposes and I am more than happy to take machines that are still perfectly usable but you guys think are too slow. I do intend to do a pretty fair upgrade in a year or two and have a dual Socket G34 Opteron setup with two 12 or 16-core processors (or whatever Intel has at the time, if it is better- their roadmaps don't go out that far yet) in my sights to replace my desktop.

 

[one-shot]

Everyone does have his or her own requirements in a PC. Speed is the main thing for most of us here. I like to multitask and run CPU intensive games/apps. i7 would be great because my current CPU isn't performing as well as I would prefer. After college there will be CPUs with many cores, until then, i7 should work well. There will also be other CPU upgrades when Westmere comes out end of this year and Gulftown next H1 2010. It's good to see some older, but still good Athlon X2s. The first PC I built had an Athlon X2 3800+, which my brother is currently using in the machine I built him.

 

[halcyon]

I'm just an enthusiast and like the hardware...I have way more power in my i7 920 and Q9450 then I really need, outside of virtualizing which, admittedly, does use all I can throw at it.