Upgrade or wait?

[Nick_50]

Below is my current set up:

Shuttle SH67H3
Intel i3-2100 CPU
16Gb RAM
Samsung EVO 850 250Gb SSD
Western Digital blue 500Gb HD
Windows 10 Home

I put the PC together in 2011 and although it isn't really slow, there are some tasks it struggles with like photo editing (RAW files in Rawtherapee) and video transcoding. Apart from that I just do web browsing and watching live/recorded tv on Mediaportal. I don't do any gaming on my PC. My motherboard is the V1 so it only accepts Sandy Bridge CPUs.

I don't want to get fed up with it, throw in the towel and buy a new system so I was looking at upgrades to keep it going for a bit longer. However, if I spend on upgrades, I would like to get at least another 2-3 years out of it.

My boss at work has an i7-2700k CPU which he is willing to sell to me for around £200.

I was looking at graphics card (EVGA GTX 750 Ti) which Shuttle says is compatible and will work on the 300W PSU but I am now moving away from this idea as I am unsure of the benefit I will get as I don't do gaming. There is also the added hassle of having to remove my PCI-E network card and go for a USB wifi solution as the GPU is double width.

So below are my options but I am not sure what is best?:

A: Spend £200 to upgrade the CPU only.
B: Spend £100 to add a GPU only.
C: Spend £300 to upgrade CPU and add GPU.
D: Do nothing and put the money towards a new system in the future. (I really like the new Skylake NUCs but my PC isn't bad enough to justify spending £700 on a new system).

 

[Beyond Names]

An i7 2700k is a legendary cpu but it sure as hell isn't worth £200, you could really buy something better and much newer. If you plan on only doing casual gaming your i3 should still be fine, rather just get the 750ti and put a £100 towards your new system.

 

[Gingerbread]

Better wait, 200 pounds for an old i7 when new ones cost like what? 250 pounds? Yeah sure. Definitely not worth it. I would probably just sell this pc for like 300 pounds and with 600 together get an i3-6100 with ddr4 memory and some gtx 950.

 

[Hawkshot]

defiantly not worth the effort, you can sell your system and maybe get a 4th gen I5 with either an GTX 750ti or get a faster GTX 950 this would be a very good mid end gaming setup.

 

[cheapo gamer]

tell your boss to suck tail trying to sell you something he paid £50 more for 4-5 years ago , just get a new cpu mobo n ram and go for skylake i5 or i7 and that will last you plenty of years to come , just dont buy second hand tat and get ripped off at the same time with no warranty also, i'd break my bosses back and have the scroat eat with spoon forced under their fingernails

 

[Nick_50]

tell your boss to suck tail trying to sell you something he paid £50 more for 4-5 years ago , just get a new cpu mobo n ram and go for skylake i5 or i7 and that will last you plenty of years to come , just dont buy second hand tat and get ripped off at the same time with no warranty also, i'd break my bosses back and have the scroat eat with spoon forced under their fingernails

To be fair to my boss he told me to find the cheapest price online and that is my price, £212 is the best I found, it may be an old CPU but it seems to hold its value.

 

[cheapo gamer]

Oh i'm sorry! is that brand new ? they go on ebay and facebook with a motherboard and ram your price , they go for that price retail because they are rarer chips now , yes they are powerful still but still irrelevant when the price of a 4790k is £230 right now compared to £298 for the skylake right now on ebay & amazon and looking at it an i7 with a 750ti on only 300w psu if anything goes it isnt so easy to source a new motherboard for that cpu, i would save for a new total build purely on the fact of warranty there is no reason to spend that much on something now there is no gurantee it will work over a week for you and rather than barebones i would go for a total custom itx build you can use a proper reliable full sized psu with a good 5-10 year warranty with protection should it fail it shouldn't take your parts with it, use the internalgpu on the i7 or look at some reviews on some programs that can use a gpu to accelerate certain tasks to help you decide if you are positive about not gaming or the gt710 doesnt look too bad a single slot fan model for 29.99 , i see so many people still using those cpu's people aren't really selling them but everything fails at some time and £200 is alot of money to invest in an aged cpu what cost £250 new years ago with aged hardware but that's my opinion and what i'd do considering parts, reliability, performance, price .I would build a new system when amd release there new cpu's intel might drop the price on skylake if they come through with competitive performance but if you do go for the 2700k the gt710 only takes around 19 watts & is a single slot fan powered card or there's a single slot gt740 but not sure of power consumption at load
i dont think you would need an external gpu if you are upgrading the cpu but these would be handy for some video encoding rather than your cpu but you can always buy the cpu and try it if you aren't happy still buy a gpu or gpu then cpu...

 

[Nick_50]

To update on this....I decided the cost of building a new Skylake PC wasn't really worth it for the benefit I would gain.

I had further trouble with my current PC not even booting into the BIOS, thought it was dead but then I removed 2 RAM sticks and now it runs perfectly, think one of the old RAMs had gone wrong which was causing the crashes before.

So it turns out my bosses CPU is a i7 2600k not the 2700k. I can't overclock on my motherboard so don't really need the K version but he is lending it to me to try in my machine to see if it makes a difference in performance. I figure that it is going to be quicker than my i3 but if I don't want it then I can give it back but if I keep it I have to give him some money. How much would you pay for a second hand i7 2600k? I've seen prices range from £90 up to £200 so have no clue.

 

[Hawkshot]

To update on this....I decided the cost of building a new Skylake PC wasn't really worth it for the benefit I would gain.

I had further trouble with my current PC not even booting into the BIOS, thought it was dead but then I removed 2 RAM sticks and now it runs perfectly, think one of the old RAMs had gone wrong which was causing the crashes before.

So it turns out my bosses CPU is a i7 2600k not the 2700k. I can't overclock on my motherboard so don't really need the K version but he is lending it to me to try in my machine to see if it makes a difference in performance. I figure that it is going to be quicker than my i3 but if I don't want it then I can give it back but if I keep it I have to give him some money. How much would you pay for a second hand i7 2600k? I've seen prices range from £90 up to £200 so have no clue.

Well personally as its 2nd hand and old now I wouldn't pay much more than £40 for it.