E8400 upgrade path?

W

WalkedAirplane

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2005
Messages
378
I've got the following right now:

Antec P82
E8400 @ 3.6ghz
8gb DDR2 Corsair
750gb HDD, 640gb HDD, and 1tb HDD. All are nearing capacity.
ATI 4850
Dell Ultrasharp 2007FP.

Debating what road to go down for the next round of updates to the system. Budget is flexible, I've got the itch right now, regardless of whether or not I need it, and a bonus coming in the next weeks anyways.

I dont really game. It's a workstation more than not. Occasionally I'll pick up something that piques my interest from steam, but really, its a programming workstation and used for a whole lot of media encoding.

Thoughts:
- Go down the i7 road. I've seen so many mixed benchmarks though. Some showing huge gains, and some showing virtually none. How will the gains stack up against an E8400 at 3.6ghz?

- Do some routine maintainence and improvements. My soundcard is lacking, though I dont used this for media too often. My hard drives are a bit hectic due to the order in which they were purchased, a VelociRaptor or a Black Edition for the OS would allow me to clean up the partitions a good bit, and hopefully offer a bit more speed.

- Just jump to quad-core on LGA775. This feels almost like its a wasted path for down the line, almost as if its a stop-gap solution that wont net me enough to justify it. Again, media encoding would probably benefit a bunch, but its arguable how much I'd really see.

Any further thoughts are more than welcome, like I said - its the itch, not necessity here. :(
 
Given your situation I would

1 ) Get 2 of those bad ass intel solid state drives and another 1tb.

2 ) Build a I core 7 box from scratch and use your old computer as a dev box or sell it.
 
If your budget permits, and you have the upgrade itch, I would go with the i7 build. You should notice a difference in performance since you do lots of media encoding. Like you mentioned, there's really no point in going with a quad-core 775 processor since that chipset has reached the end of its life. Go with an i7 920 build and you'll be quite happy.
 
Hmm, SSD is promising. The G.Skil Falcon 128gb looks like a really solid drive for the price.

That may be my itch relief for now, but I'm still kicking ideas around. May splurge for i7 and the SSD.

Budget is $800 - 900 or so, anything I replace in my main machine I am happy to reuse in an HTPC, so its not all wasted.
 
Why are you upgrading? Even if you have the "itch," it's just somewhat silly, despite the fact that it's your prerogative/money. Surely you have other areas in your life that could use the money. I know it sounds preachy, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

My upgrade path would be to wait a few more months until i7 becomes the mainstream and SSD drives drop in price some more.

That's just my $.02...
 
waylay00 said:
My upgrade path would be to wait a few more months until i7 becomes the mainstream and SSD drives drop in price some more.
Click to expand...

Waiting for SSD price drops could mean waiting a while because there's no certain date for when they will drop. And I believe the i7 is already mainstream.
 
Unless you need an HTPC, I'd skip i7 and just upgrade to a Q9400 or better. Then pickup a couple or few SSDs, like the OCZ Vertex SSDs, and throw them in RAID0. When i7 is on its die shrink, do a full overhaul. If you need parts for an HTPC, then go i7 and re-task your current parts.
 
waylay00 said:
Why are you upgrading? Even if you have the "itch," it's just somewhat silly, despite the fact that it's your prerogative/money. Surely you have other areas in your life that could use the money. I know it sounds preachy, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

My upgrade path would be to wait a few more months until i7 becomes the mainstream and SSD drives drop in price some more.

That's just my $.02...
Click to expand...

Not to be a dick, but I didnt ask for life advice. If you're wondering, things are pretty alright here and silly or not, this is a hobby of mine. Consider what forum you are on.

That said, I do a whole whole lot of media encoding, and a fair share of application development, frankly while my system is capable, I can see gains, and I feel like it.

Thinking right now that I'm going to pull the i7 switcheroo and pickup an SSD, then I can reuse my OS disk and general hardware in an HTPC / media server.
 
Ditch all your OS disks and head into Win7. 60GB Vertexes seem like a decent buy, something like $200 a piece. I've been itching to go i7, actually have bought the CPU + Ram (but Mobo came out too late) but the thermal oven that it is led me away from it. Gonna wait for the 32nm for this one. One thing is that X58 MAY be compatible with 32nm Gulftown CPUs, so going i7 right now and switching CPUs later may not be a bad thing. If you're going i7 you should do it soon since the announcement of i7 920 chips being axed just got released - inflated prices just around the corner.
 
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