Is my X58 Still a good motherboard?

[liquidsnake718]

Ive had this for 3 years now and its still going strong. Im using a core i7 950 and a Gigabyte X58 ud3r. I still think its good for 2-4 more years, even my gpu which is a 5850 is still a great card and can last the whole DX11 generation if need be.

I am however thinking of getting another cpu, maybe not as good as this one was 3 years ago, but a mid range one for another room. What would you advise? a Z77 board? Should I wait for the ivy bridge revision?

 

[DJDeCiBeL]

Just wait for Haswell when it's released next year. The i7 950 is still plenty strong enough to get you there.

 

[liquidsnake718]

even for haswell, is the X58 good enough until the core line ends?

 

[DJDeCiBeL]

even for haswell, is the X58 good enough until the core line ends?

Not sure when the Core line WILL end, honestly, but I'd say the i7 950 has at least ONE more good year left in it. Possibly two or three, if you don't do A LOT of CPU intensive things past gaming.

I'd still say that Haswell (or Broadwell, its successor) would be the time to upgrade.

 

[jaquith]

Ive had this for 3 years now...

Duh what?! I think you mean (2) Two years. I purchased my UD3R's shortly after their release in May 2010; version 1.0 was at the turn of 2010.

Anyway, even today the X58/i7-9XX is overkill for 'most' folks home use, so unless you're Rendering something large quite often there's little benefit from X58 -> Z77 or the most logical X58 -> X79. IF you are rendering then get a 6-core e.g. i7-3930K or Xeon E5 8-core.

For 'Gaming' then get a GTX 670/680 or HD 7970 GPU(s) either in SLI or CF will be fine and with very little frame rate loss over a SB/SB-E/IB.

I updated my i7-930 to an i7-3930K and with the exception of 'my' rendering (SQL) I cannot tell the difference in 99.9% of the things I do daily including gaming. My daughter's i7-980X just updated 3-WAY EVGA GTX 680 4GB keeps up fine with the SB/SB-E/IB. Therefore, my current objective is to keep the i7-980X until it dies.

As for Haswell I'm personally not expecting, I'm hoping though, any 'significant' improvements over the SB/IB...we'll see.

 

[suteck]

Depends on what you'll want the other one to do?? If you're talking mid range and not trying to upgrade the one you have then go ahead and get one of the new ones. The waiting game is a never ending one. I'll wait for Haswell, I'll wait for broadwell, I'll wait for the commonwealth to return. thing is, if you want another computer to do the basic things then the ivy bridge is a good solid chip that can do things with less power consumption and heat. I say Go ahead and get you a (depending on what you want to spend of course), Z77 board like the GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD3H for $150 and a i7-3770S Ivy Bridge 3.1GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) for $310 while using the intel 4000 on-die graphics. So for around $600 you can have a decent machine for doing the simple things.