1st gen CPU vs 3rd gen CPU (Intel)

TehNevs

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I am considering an upgrade from an i7 950 to an i7-3770k. The main reason was that I want to upgrade my motherboard, as it seems to be having some issues lately (ports dying and such). I've had this old setup for about 3-4 years now. I do a lot of rendering in Sony Vegas, 720p and 1080p footage. I am wondering if I will notice any real world difference from this upgrade? I mainly render HD video and do gaming on this PC. I was looking at an AsRock Motherboard to house it in.

I also have a GTX 670 that I recently purchased and I know some of these newer boards have the PCI 3.0 which, if I understand right, should make my 670 run faster?

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with upgrading from a 1st gen to a 3rd gen and if you have seen any real world improvement. I've seen the benchmark tests but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worth the 300-500$ upgrade.
 

Archlolx

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Your i7 950 should do fine with rendering 1080p footage on Vegas. If your motherboard is dying just get a new board first. The 3770k is a nice upgrade from the one you have now, but I don't really seethe point if your current CPU works just fine with waht you do.
 

azathoth

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An i7-3770k, clock for clock alone is 30% faster.
It can also be easily overclocked to 4.5Ghz on a cheap aftermarket air cooler. My i7-930 hits 4ghz, but it's a voltage wall to go higher.

The i7-3770k will probably end up being 50% faster for rendering in the end if you overclock it as much as you can versus your current processor.

The GTX 670 you have now will only "run faster" if you are playing a game where you have a CPU bottleneck, is your current processor overclocked at all?
Games such as Battlefield 3 will see an improvement in framerates, but others will only gain a small boost in framerate.

However, if you plan on doing a system upgrade, I recommend at least holding out until the Haswell release in (march?) next year. Just a few more months to go.
 

TehNevs

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It does render 1080p video, but I'm wondering if I'd see a significant speed boost when rendering hours of video. It takes about 50-60 minutes currently to rendering about 25-30 minutes of 1080p footage. If it was a significant improvement over that I would consider the upgrade. I can always sell my current i7 950 so the cost wouldn't be that high, I'm just wondering if it's worth doing if I had the money set aside to do so.

Also, does the PCI 3.0 make a big difference over 2.0 for my GPU?


An i7-3770k, clock for clock alone is 30% faster.
It can also be easily overclocked to 4.5Ghz on a cheap aftermarket air cooler. My i7-930 hits 4ghz, but it's a voltage wall to go higher.

The i7-3770k will probably end up being 50% faster for rendering in the end if you overclock it as much as you can versus your current processor.

The GTX 670 you have now will only "run faster" if you are playing a game where you have a CPU bottleneck, is your current processor overclocked at all?
Games such as Battlefield 3 will see an improvement in framerates, but others will only gain a small boost in framerate.

However, if you plan on doing a system upgrade, I recommend at least holding out until the Haswell release in (march?) next year. Just a few more months to go.
When I say run faster, I mean does the the PCI 3.0 give a significant boost over 2.0? I may just hold out for the Haswell release.

Also, my current CPU is not overclocked at all, I've always been paranoid about diving into that stuff, but I may give it a try :na:
 
There are maybe a few frames difference between 2.0 and 3.0 with PCI-E. As I understand the big jump in performance came with Sandy Bridge over gen 1 i5/i7's. A ivy bridge would be a significant upgrade. I can understand not wanting to by another motherboard its more of a band aid not a upgrade.
 

TehNevs

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That's what I was wondering about, I live in an apartment with 3 other guys in college and I render sometimes hours of video a day, I'm guessing this would cut down significantly on my electricity bill? I am also using a Samsung 830 256GB SSD.
 

TehNevs

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Yeah, haha, if I'm going to upgrade the motherboard I'd rather just spoil myself and upgrade the CPU as well :na:

thanks so much for all the fast replies!
 

azathoth

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PCI3.0 has twice the bandwidth as PCI2.0, however this is irrelevant because no cards can even fully saturate the bandwidth of PCI2.0 to begin with. You might see a 1% (if that) performance increase for your video card from PCI2.0 to PCI3.0

Overclocking is actually REALLY easy to do, if you have the stock intel cooler however, DO NOT ATTEMPT IT!

In short, for the i7-950 which is the same method as my i7-930.
Raise the FSB clock by a small amount each time, and run Prime95 and Realtemp. When the program or your system crashes, raise the Vcore slightly and attempt again. Repeat raising the FSB, testing, raising voltage as needed until your temperatures start to get too high. Then you're done!

A video guide on youtube for simple overclocking of the i7-9xx series would explain it better.
 
He is having issues with ports on his motherboard hes not looking to stick with the same CPU. And as I understand just for argument sake the haswell cpu's only advancement really is a little bit higher performance but really low energy requirement.
 

TehNevs

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Eh, I hope not, wouldn't that require soldering? I don't trust myself to do that with expensive components :non:
 

azathoth

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Intel already released a statement that they were NOT moving to BGA, which is soldered onto the motherboard.
They are continuing to use their current LGA sockets, at least for the desktop market.
 

darksparten

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Pcie 3.0 vs 2.0 is nearly no difference, many high end cards like the HIS 7970x2 are actually only supported up to Pcie 2.0 because even a super GPU can't fully saturate a 2.0 interface.

On paper the i7 3770k is around 20-30% faster than the 930 mainly because of the transistor shrink, and it can be overclocked much better than the 930. I'd go with the i7-3770k now, and simply upgrade to 14nm in 2 years or so(Haswell is estimated to perform 3-5% better than Ivy, considering it's not a shrink).

Good luck!
 

TehNevs

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thanks for the advice, I'm really getting excited about upgrading now.....So I may just have to :pt1cable:
 

TehNevs

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The reviews on the Formula OC seem to be better, why do you prefer the stated normal board over this one? Just wondering and weighing my options, I already have 12GB of ram so I dont plan to upgrade those, and my case sits under a desk so I dont show it off much. Looks aren't as important as functionality to me :)
 
Well I just feel like at that price point you could do better you are spending 200+ dollars on a motherboard you should be purchasing something better. Your Asus Maximus, Asrock extreme 9 or 6 even, gigabyte up7 or sniper series. I recommended the Asus ones because yes it looks amazing but it has the functionality of the higher end boards at a smaller price and it takes up a lot less room and can handle crossfire/sli.
 

TehNevs

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I do like the extreme9, I try to leave myself plenty of room for expansion because I find myself buying little addons on all the time for my machine. I currently have 5 HDD's and an SSD in my tower to give an example. So I'll take a look into this one. Thanks for the tip!
 

bctande1

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1st Gen to 3rd Gen
If you are looking to do heavy graphics would, I would absolutely recommend picking up any IVB i7, due not only to the performance increase which will range around 30-40-50% depending on your application, but also to the price, which will most likely be dropping around Christmas time by a pretty nice amount. I remember during Black Friday I saw a 2600k for 250$ -- very good deal.

The thing about Haswell is that the new line of CPUs will be more aimed at decreasing power-draw than sky-rocketing performance. Despite the new 22nm process, Ivy Bridge's core architecture is not manufactured to take full advantage of the smaller processor fabrication -- For the most part it is identical to Sandy Bridge. Haswell will stay on the same 22nm node, but will feature a core architecture optimized to take full advantage of 22nm, which means stable performance whilst consuming much less power. Haswell represents a significant investment by Intel into the mobile market, and the desktop CPUs have more or less taken a back seat thus far.

Nevertheless, I really do think the 3770k will not disappoint. As far as OCing goes, IVB is notorious for being fairly poor overclockers, due to the thermal compound they used instead of soldering, and that translated to a typical spike in temps after surpassing a certain voltage level, or core clock. Right now, a 4.5GHz IVB overclock would be considered pretty good - unlike Sandy Bridge which could go much farther. Push IVB past 4.6 and 4.7, and you will see a dramatic increase in temps. Now, I understand you will most likely not need a 4.7GHz overclock, so I wouldn't stress out about this too much. If you are not looking to overclock, however, you can save a few bucks by opting to go for a 3770 without the "k", which implies the CPU cannot really overclock, but will cost less.

The gaming performance when moving to IVB will likely vary depending on what game you are playing. BF3, for example, is one of the very few games that takes advantage of virtually every resource you throw at it, so will certainly see improvements there. Another game is Skyrim, which is known to be very CPU-dependant. There will be other games like DiRT 3, however, that will shoot up in frames with a GPU upgrade, regardless of CPU power. It really just depends



Motherboard

Motherboards are rated on more than just the amounts of ports they have. One thing you should take into consideration is the VRM, which is a bit too off for me to fully explain here. You mentioned that you have 6 different storage drives?

I think that this MOBO would be ideal --

Gigabyte Z77X-D3H - I actually purcahsed this on Black Friday for my build, and I am very satisfied with it. It has a total of four SATA II ports and four SATA III ports, giving you an extra two SATA ports for whatever you need. It can work with SLI configurations in case you ever wanna upgrade to dual 670s in the future, and VRM is quite good.

You can go with the Maximus but understand that those boards are meant for high end overlocking/Dual-GPU configs. You won't really see much of the performance increase and you will be facing dimishing returns for the most parts. You don't need to spend over 150$ on a MOBO with your needs.

As far as PCIE -- the differences are pretty negligible if you using any single card, period. It's just more band-with

Anything I didn't cover?


 
Yea in terms of feature boards you can spend very little the D3H is good the UP4 Z77 comes with dual thunderport which may come in use for someone who renders who has a external component. ie., external hard drives.

Also with ivy bridge it was discussed earlier that the performance increase wouldn't be much it was more of a push for lower power consumption.
 

bctande1

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Ivy Bridge or Haswell?