Deciding what to upgrade

[laddiemawery]

I've had everything in here for about two years, except the case which I just recently bought.

How do you go about deciding what needs to be upgraded? I don't really play games anymore, but I do edit videos frequently and I would like to be able to up to 4k if possible. Are the Quadro and FirePro cards really worth the price compared to other high end NVIDIA or AMD cards?

Same goes with finding a new CPU. I've looked at and compared a few different CPU's on cpuboss, but I don't really know how accurate that information is, or what it even means to be honest.

Basically, how do you decide whats the bottleneck in your build?

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Well, looking at things, you have a pretty solid build, and it should compare very well to a brand new Haswell system in many regards. When looking at what to upgrade, ultimately there's a tradeoff between cost and the associated increase in performance.

Your CPU - you could upgrade the motherboard and CPU and get a few percentage points increase in processing power. It might save you a few seconds in video processing. Is that few seconds per video worth the $400-500 in cost? Probably not. If it saved you a few hours per video? Well that would be a different story.

You could upgrade the video card, but you probably don't need professional level video cards to work with some of the video software programs, many of the higher end software packages do support consumer level cards. That's something you'd have to investigate though based on what you use. I will say this though, there's a big difference between the 700 series Nvidia cards and the 900 series. As for the Quadro/Firepro, those are mostly an issue of driver and software support versus actual performance. Quadro/Firepro drivers are seriously worked over for stability. If you're doing this professionally, then yes, quadro/firepro. If not, and it's just for fun, then no, you don't need it.

In all honesty, if you're not going to increase your performance by a significant amount (at least 20% or so) or increase your productivity by a significant amount and reduce your time sitting and waiting, then it's usually not worth a significant outlay in cash.

 

[laddiemawery]

Well, looking at things, you have a pretty solid build, and it should compare very well to a brand new Haswell system in many regards. When looking at what to upgrade, ultimately there's a tradeoff between cost and the associated increase in performance.

Your CPU - you could upgrade the motherboard and CPU and get a few percentage points increase in processing power. It might save you a few seconds in video processing. Is that few seconds per video worth the $400-500 in cost? Probably not. If it saved you a few hours per video? Well that would be a different story.

You could upgrade the video card, but you probably don't need professional level video cards to work with some of the video software programs, many of the higher end software packages do support consumer level cards. That's something you'd have to investigate though based on what you use. I will say this though, there's a big difference between the 700 series Nvidia cards and the 900 series. As for the Quadro/Firepro, those are mostly an issue of driver and software support versus actual performance. Quadro/Firepro drivers are seriously worked over for stability. If you're doing this professionally, then yes, quadro/firepro. If not, and it's just for fun, then no, you don't need it.

In all honesty, if you're not going to increase your performance by a significant amount (at least 20% or so) or increase your productivity by a significant amount and reduce your time sitting and waiting, then it's usually not worth a significant outlay in cash.

Thanks a lot for the reply! One question with it though. Would it be worth upgrading to something in the 900 series line, or would the 770 I have now be enough to eventually run multiple 1440p or 4k monitors? Are any of the AMD cards able to hold up with NVIDIA?

Edit: Quick thought that came into my head. Is overclocking worth it without doing much of any gaming?