Help with new system "upgrade".

miggtt699

Distinguished
I'm thinking of upgrading to a X5650 with a X58 Motherboard (Asus Sabertooth X58) and I currently have a B85 system with a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB.

Here's the thing: I currently have 520Mb/s on this board, but the motherboard I want supports Sata III but apparently it's a Marvel controller, and people say it's bad if not worse than Sata II, and I have a few questions...

1- Will I notice that big of a difference between Sata III and Sata II?

2- Is a PCI-E Sata card worth it? And will I be able to boot through it on my motherboard? (I know they're poo but check this one out)

3- Should I just not upgrade?

Current system specs:
Intel Core i5 4690 3.5GHz (3.9Ghz Turbo Boost)
kingston HyperX FURY 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz
ASRock B85M Pro4
EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB GDDR5
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB Sata 3 (OS)
Western Digital Blue 1TB Sata 3 (secondary drive/recordings)
Western Digital Blue 500GB Sata 2 (backup)
Corsair VS650 PSU

I really want some 6 core overclocking action because locked processors are boring and so is 4 cores for rendering. 😛

Pls halp!
 
The SATA III Marvell controller on the X58 boards of that era is okay for a single drive, basically it would offer no change. When you try to have more then one drive at full SATA III speeds it becomes quickly saturated.

I would consider what you are doing quite the downgrade. You will be going from a 4th Gen i5 to basically a first gen i7. The extra cache and cores might be useful in rendering, but you will suffer on instructions per second.
 


I've seen everywhere at at 4Ghz it's perfectly able to beat a 4770K in multithread workloads, and it's not just some benchmark, various benchmarks tell me the same be it passmark, geekbench, cinebench... I'll get lower performance on single core loads and I am aware of that but, I'm rendering videos a lot so I need more cores. 1 minute of 2K footage takes me 5 minutes to render with this i5 and it's awful.
 
I could see that being the case, but with a little more expenditure you could get an 6-core i7-5820k with all the benefits of the Haswell architecture as well as twice the memory bandwidth.

I supposes it depends on what you are paying for this old hardware. I retired my x58 board due to SATA II vs SATA III issues (which is how I found out the marvell controller can be saturated). That board still functions, but is starting to show signs of memory controller issues. ASUS Rampage Formula III.

 


The money I'll spend on a 5820K could buy me two X58 sabertooths and two X5650s, so I don't think that's an option.

I may upgrade down the road, I just really want a machine to mess around with, I'll probably be keeping my i5 rig still but not use it.
 
You're losing a lot of CPU efficiency in moving backward. Haswell has better IPC meaning it can do more in fewer clocks then Westmere can. If you want more rendering power, the cheapest option would be to get a Xeon 1231V3 for your board. That's eight threads, but no overclocking. Next up would be a 4790K. Your board doesn't officially support overclocking, but it has a few unofficial settings to do so. The only question is whether the boards limited VRM would artificially throttle the 4790K do to power restrictions.

What is the actual budget you're planning to spend on this X58 rig? I've a feeling we can find you a more modern alternative at about the same money.
 


Doubt so, for the price it's costing me, I could definitely buy that Xeon, but it just wouldn't feed my overclocking needs, I miss overclocking things ever since I got this 4690, and it's performing at the levels of a 5820K when overclocked, in encoding anyways, that's what I need it for.

I will definitely be overclocking the X5650 to 4Ghz at least, so..

Update: I'll be spending around 250€ on these two parts.