Looking to furthur upgrade my PC. Help Please

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Hi all

Need help on making a decision.

My Specs:
Mobo: H61MU-E35 (B3)
CPU: i5-2400
Cooler: Cooler Master X Dream i117
RAM: 2x Kingston PC3-12800 DDR3 4GB 1600Mhz (down to 1333Mhz since i5 2400 only supports up to 1333Mhz)
GPU: Zotac Gtx 970
PSU: Aerocool Strike X 600W
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache (I have four of these and a WD5000AAKS)

So I have an i5 3470, will I see improvement, gaming wise, if I swap my i5 2400 with my i5 3470? Because now my CPU speed will be higher and the 1600Mhz RAM will be utilized since i5 3470 can support up to 1600. Will I see improvement in gaming? Also I'm planning to buy a SSD but since my motherboard is a H61 It doesn't have SATA3 to take advantage of the SSD. Can you recommend a good affordable motherboard with SATA3 for LGA1155?

Should I use the i5 3470 or sell it to buy something else? I'm going for maximum affordability here since I'm tight on budget, and I'm not rushing to Haswell since a lot of people on the internet says 2nd/3rd gen i-processors are still powerful enough for today's gaming.

Thanks everybody.
 
Solution
It would be a tiny bit faster but not sure if you'd really notice the difference between the 2400 and 3470. Even with it allowing 1600mhz memory speed. Some performance increase is better than none in any situation but I just don't think you'll see a huge difference if at all. Maybe sell the 3470 and hold off on the ssd and use those funds instead to look into a newer motherboard and cpu - although you said you're in no rush to move to haswell. Haswell should be about 20-30% faster than the 2400 but at this point you may want to wait and see what skylake has to offer when it comes out (skylake will use a different socket than haswell).

If you don't mind reinstalling the cooler and fiddling with it, no reason not to install the 3470.
It would be a tiny bit faster but not sure if you'd really notice the difference between the 2400 and 3470. Even with it allowing 1600mhz memory speed. Some performance increase is better than none in any situation but I just don't think you'll see a huge difference if at all. Maybe sell the 3470 and hold off on the ssd and use those funds instead to look into a newer motherboard and cpu - although you said you're in no rush to move to haswell. Haswell should be about 20-30% faster than the 2400 but at this point you may want to wait and see what skylake has to offer when it comes out (skylake will use a different socket than haswell).

If you don't mind reinstalling the cooler and fiddling with it, no reason not to install the 3470.
 
Solution
It depends alot on which gamse you play.

The i5-2400 is still a good enough processor for most games out there, though there's also some games where a better performing processor will help you alot.
Upgrading for your i5-3470 won't give you much of an improvement, and the increase in RAM speed will only help you by a minor percentage in most scenarios.
Here are the cpubenchmark.com scores for both CPU's plus a low budget gaming CPU that will bottleneck in games like battlefield 4:
Athlon X4 760K - 4,602
i5-3470 - 6,565
i5-2400 - 5,812
Performance increase: ~13%
This score is made of many different benchmarks.

If you're not experiencing any fps drops in the games you play, then i woud just sell the 3rd gen i5, wait till the next generation of CPU's come out. Look at what price you'll be able to sell the 3470 at, would you pay that price (which keeping it basically is) for a 13% performance increase?

I don't think you should bother with getting a new motherboard just to get the SSD, either buy one now and just run it at decreased speed, or just wait untill you do a bigger upgrade, where SSD's will probably be even cheaper, and you'll have a new SSD when you can fully utilize it.
No matter what, you should ONLY buy the SSD if you're installing your OS on it, else there's really not much point to it, when you have a tight budget. 😉

Personally, my choice would be to upgrade to Haswell CPU + motherboard + SSD, reinstall OS on SSD. BUT only if I had performance issues in some of my games.
Else i would wait untill a new generation of CPU's are released, thought you'll probably also need new ram for any future CPU lineup (because they'll be rocking DDR4 RAM, not DDR3).


Hope this helped! :)
 
Yeah, I was actually thinking about selling my mobo, i5 2400 and i5 3470 to buy a good haswell procie and motherboard but is it worth waiting for skylake?
 
No telling. Most of skylake's improvements will be smaller die, lower energy consumption (kind of a null point on a desktop with current power consumption) and a few other new features. It may have better overclocking headroom if they move the ivr's off chip like they said they would, but maybe the same as haswell. It's looking at a 22nm process with ivr's or 14nm process without - my theory is it will balance itself out as far as heat issues. Overall performance increase, I wouldn't expect anything more over haswell than your 3470 would give you over the 2400. Again it's all speculation since no one has a skylake in hand to test and give feedback on. Things in reality turned out differently for devil's canyon than they projected too. They're still good chips, just not hitting 5ghz on air like they initially thought.