Old School Processor Vs New School Processor

[_Joe_]

Hi all.

Your opinions/experience would be appreciated.

I have been looking at upgrading my system and have been doing the usual research. From reading on this site and elsewhere a good combination seems to be an i5-4690k and Z97 Asus VII Hero Board. I wanted to get 16GB of RAM as I use Virtual box and various IDE's. Corsair Vengeance 1866Mhz CL9 seems half decent.

However, apart from "Your running out of RAM" warnings my current system does seem to amble along quite contently. I currently have a core 2 Quad Q9400@2.66 GHz Overclocked to 3.7GHz on air. 6 GB of 6400 RAM and a Radeon HD 7970.MoBo is an Asus P5E Deluxe (Max 8GB RAM)

I do a bit of gaming and I run the card in eyefinity at 5760*1080. I play most games in around the medium settings, though often switch off fancy shadows and realistic water.

Do you guys think I will see a major/minor/mediocre improvement on what I have if I change out the components mentioned above? Or are there other components I should consider?

 

[kira70591]

At this point it is time for an upgrade. You would see major benefits from the new chipset (storage features chief among them for Z97) and you would also see major performance increases from upgrading to a current CPU. Your processor is about 5 generations old and the technology in the new ones are light years ahead. The C2Quads are still quite good, but compared to the new ones they do not hold a candle. It is not like you are upgrading to Haswell from Ivy. You would be making quite a leap forward. You would also be able to take true advantage of DDR3 memory along with being able to have true native PCIe3 support. If you use VMs, I would recommend getting a Core i7 such as the new 4790k as you would be able to take advantage of the hyperthreading which you could use to allocate more cores to your VMs.

If you do decide to upgrade, make sure to get a decent aftermarket cooler. The new refresh chips do run a bit cooler but they still generate quite a bit of heat and something such as a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo would be quite beneficial. You could also look at getting a new SSD or a Sata 6G drive. This could significantly increase your performance as well if you are still running on an old IDE drive or Sata 3G or below.

When you upgrade your memory, remember to get 1600 or 1866 memory. You can get higher clocked memory than that but you start to see diminishing returns compared to the price after those clocks.

What power supply are you using? You could possibly need to get a new one for it to be compatible with the new power saving steps that are in Haswell. It would allow you to save quite a bit of energy as your computer could idle using a tiny amount of watts.

The Asus board is good, but you could always take a look at MSIs Z97 boards. They have different versions such as the G series gaming models or the Mpower series. I would highly recommend the Mpower series if you want to overclock. I have a Z87 Mpower in my gaming rig and I have been able to use it to overclock test chips like a dream. So far the board has been rock solid in over 4 different rigs that I have built for friends and myself.

 

[logainofhades]

Swapping to any i5/i7/Xeon E3 1230v3 or better, would be a vast improvement over your old Core 2.

 

[_Joe_]

Kira70591 thanks for the reply and detailed analysis of the problem.

Your information is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I will investigate the paths you have mentioned and reevaluate the build.

Thanks again.
Joe