New cpu upgrade Dual Xeon-E5-2670 or a i7?

[garry14151514]

Hi i want to get a new cpu because my current one is bottlenecking my gpu and i can either get a i7 4770 (and get a new motherboard my current one isGigabyte ud7-x58a) or get a server based motherboard which will probably fit in my case (thermaltake gt 10) and get a dual Xeon E5 2670. i wont be editing purely for gaming maybe some photoshop but very light work (mostly banner/logo design for websites.)
PC SPECS
CPU: i7 930 @ 2.8 ghz
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 @1470 mhz
Ram: 20 GB
Power Supply: 1000w Xigamatek
Case: Thermaltake gt 10
CPU Cooler: Arctic Freezer pro 13
Motherboard: Gigabyte UD7-X58A
OS: Windows 10

 

[rush21hit]

If that's your reasoning, I agree with SoNic67.

The most potent locked chip 1366 has is W3690 and X5690, basically the same chip. 3,4 base clock with 3,7 boost on 6/12 with 130watt TDP. Those thing was priced $1k at launch. Now its about 180 on ebay. This thing screams performance.

Overall performance, you're looking at i7 2600 level. Per core performance nearly at Haswell's i3 level. Hugely faster than your 930.

And then there are 980X and 990X. A 6 cores overclocker monster. Even as second hand stuff those things still priced nearly at modern i7 level, but for a good reason. If you could get either of those beasts at 4Ghz on all cores, which should be easy by raising the multiplier alone without any overvolting, might as well skip entirely for Skylake gen and the next 2 gen after that. And the H100i is quite capable to help you achieve just that.

I too own a 1366 platform. My 1366 board was ASUS P6T(non Deluxe) with i7 920 running default then going @3,2 when Sandy came up. I replace it to 3570K simply because I don't like its power consumption whence I live by myself.

 

[j3ster]

Really? Do you even have an idea what a Xeon does in games? Is not even sweating (average CPU use 17%, none of the cores break 100%) - below is mine at 1920x1080 ultra settings everywhere, Fallout 4, screenshoot after playing a few minutes.
As you can see Fallout process has 54 threads. I think that's multithreaded all right.

why bring up CPU usage? it doesnt scream performance FPS is the thing he needs, thats how he plays not how much load the CPU takes.

heres just my advice for the OP.

if you can get the i7 6700k upgrade with a decent motherboard go for it. itll serve you good for the coming year and hopefully longer, till you get another budget to do an overhaul. do overclock it 😀 this set up will really give you what you need esp. in gaming.

skip the i5 6600K, since the title says xeon vs i7 anyway so the real choices are E5 2670 vs i7 6700k

or just go for the Xeon build, save up and wait for new intel CPUs or AMD CPUs and chipsets coming out later this year and plan your upgrade there that is if you are not in a hurry. so you have 2 great options. best wishes and happy gaming 😀

 

[sshades]

Upgrading with the same motherboard would certainly save you a lot of money, and it's probably "good enough". Do note that for current gaming (and this will probably continue in the near to mid future), gaming doesn't scale particularly well up to 12 threads or probably even 6 threads. That W3690 would definitely give you a boost from the higher clock speed at the very least though. The vast majority of games do the most important work on one or two threads and then attempt to offload additional, less-important work to the other threads. If you look at benchmarks, most games hit a sort of optimal performance around 4 cores. So 4 fast cores like a recent i5 will probably give you a noticeable advantage over 6 slower cores. You'll need to be the one to decide for yourself whether that is worth the large additional cost to you though.

On the flip side of that, newer hardware (especially when you skip up 5 generations) is obviously going to have some advantages. You're going to see faster memory (which makes certain workloads faster but probably doesn't affect gaming much), newer interfaces such as faster PCI-E slots and USB/SATA ports, and other things like that. Many of these may not effect you now but are a bit more future-proof. Newer CPUs also have small tweaks to accelerate certain specific workloads like certain types of rendering. Again you'll need to be the one to make the decision whether it's worth all the additional cost for those things though.

Based on what you've described though, I'd say you wouldn't get a lot out of an i7 over an i5. Also, I personally think that your GTX 970 is going to be plenty for 1080P gaming for several years at least, so I don't think you need to worry about upgrading that until it starts to cause you problems. It's a "current" generation card, so there really isn't even anything to upgrade to in the same price range as you bought it for. You'd have to move up to something in the high end price range to get a significant boost in performance.

This is more of a side note to anyone else reading since sonic mentioned it... Xeons are really not the same thing as higher end i7s in general. Xeons are a huge range of CPUs including everything from cheap and slow to absolutely massive. There is probably more range in the Xeon line than there is in all of the other Intel "big core" chips combined even if you just narrow it down to relatively recent chips. Their power draw goes from 35W up to 150W. They have a much wider range of core counts from 4 to 24. Some have graphics, some don't. Some have hyper-threading, some don't. I've seen clocks on them anywhere from 1.8 GHz up to 5.1 GHz (and there are probably more that I haven't seen). The most important point is that the majority of i7s sold (i7 6700K as an example) are on a completely different platform than the majority of Xeon chips. And the "mainstream" Xeon line (if there is such a thing) is currently two generations behind the desktop chips.

 

[garry14151514]

Hi i just wanted to say the reason the xeon build is so expensive is becuase my current motherboard ( Gigabyte x58a-ud7) probably can't fit a xeon processer i know you can get them cheap on ebay thats why i was asking you guys and what j3ster is right. but maybe i should just wait maybe 1 year till prices get cheaper and maybe buy a i7 4790k with a new motherboard?

 

[j3ster]

get the BEST cheapest option you have, mind you the emphasis on BEST. and wait till new gen. comes, since its quite close, by the time they arrive youd probably would have saved up to get really good parts for an upgrade. since you were thinking of these "Xeon based build ($600), i7 based build ($750) , i5 based build ($550)" so i assume youd be able to save up properly.