Q6600 upgrade to i5 2500k/i7 2500k

Since your not a gamer first, but rendering first, this is one of the only situations I would suggest the i7.

Bah, Hyperthreading makes little difference when rendering, the biggest bang comes from overclocking and the i5 will run neck and neck with an overclocked i7 for rendering in most cases. Money is better spent on a GPU if your software can use it, like a Quadro; followed by a fast drive systems (SSD or raid) IMO.

What software will you be using? you can google for benchmarks. If you find some post them back here for all to see.

Thanks.

He is very correct, for $100 extra, you'll net a 5-12% increase (fabricated albeit probably close percentages)

I did think that the $100.00 could be spent in other areas of the setup to offer better performance compared to a slight cpu performance boost.

Software I will be using; photoshop cs5, autocad, revit, sketch up, 3ds max, image rendering programs, bf3  

i was planning on using a 4850 1gb that i allready have so the extra cash would either go towards more ram/better mobo/bigger ssd, il have a look for some benchmarks but i have been using the ones on thg to give me an idea of performance.

If this is at all a price point on your machine, you should REALLY invest else where. Seeing the GFX you chose sets off a few alarms for me. If you want cuda try a 560, if you can good pop and vm get a 6950. Both sort of feasible  

Yes, price is a very large factor in my new system. I'm a poor student  
From looking at the benchmarks on thg on those gfx cards I think il stick with what i have then upgrade later on.

As a student then go for the Intel® Core™ i5-2500K it is about the best performance vs value processor on the market right now. At same clock speed the 2nd generation Intel Core processor at around 10-15% over the 1st gen processors at the same speed; and they are around 15% faster over the Intel Core 2 Quad processors at the same speed. If you were to benchmark the two systems I would expect that you would see 30% or better performance improvement.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

you being a student i cant see you having to have to do anything extreme when it comes to rendering. plus there is always computer labs that just send the renderings to servers so i would go with the i5 even though the 2600k is the much better choice. also look heavily into a work station gpu.

You'll want more than a 4850 for BF3.  

The computers I have access to are worse then my current desktop and i'm pretty sure I don't have access to any rendering servers. The longest render I have done took around 7 hours, was something like 3000x6000 pixels and 100 passes.

I will have a look into workstation cards, I don't really know anything about them though.
The main performance boost i'm looking for is making the process of editing the models quicker and moving about them.
E.g. the last model I was working on took between 5-10 minutes to open and was very choppy when changing views making it hard and frustrating to work on. Editing parts like removing all groups in sketch up models or exporting them as .3ds files would also take over 10 minutes easily.

I will be using the system to render on but i will also have another desktop and a laptop so the idea was to do the settings and views on the new system then put them across to my laptop or secondary desktop and render on there allowing me to carry on working on my main machine.

yeah for the load problem, thats more of a hard drive being slow. make sure your not saving the files to an external hard drive as that will slow it down a lot too. but the studdering while editing will be basically eliminated with a workstation gpu. they are just optimized better to do cad type work.

oh and render times will be about half with the i7 and about 60% with the i5. meaning instead of 7 hours it would be 3.5 and 4.2 hours respectively

That sounds reasonable. Will the upgrade in ram not have any effect on the stuttering? Just trying to find out if I could get away with a higher spec gamer gpu then a workstation card, seems like I need to make a decision on how much I want to play games or not on this new machine.

um well if you got a lower end gaming card then your suffering in both catagories but if you get a mid to high end gaming or workstation card then you would be ok in the other catagory but workstation gpus are expensive so you might just consider a mid to high end nvidia gpu unless you have the money to splurge on a workstation gpu

thanks for the input.

How does this sound for setup?

GPU MSI gtx 570
CPU I5 2500k
Motherboard Asus p8p67 le
RAM Kingston hyperx 8gb
PSU xfx pro 550w
Case Antec 100
CPU Cooler Gelid tranquillo
Dvd drive Sony dvd drive
HDD Samsung spintpoint 1tb

This topic has been moved from the section CPU & Components to section Systems by Mousemonkey