Haswell Upgrade - Looking for some bargains

• 

  11112007 on 07/06/2013 - 16:19

  +2

  Wouldn't bother, you're rig is still quite good.

  Give it another year I say.

  • 

    ThadtheChad on 07/06/2013 - 16:23

    The CPU doesn't have enough "grunt" as compared to Haswell. :( Feel the age at times. Also need a new motherboard as one of the RAM slots is non-functional. Coupled with only SATA-2 ports (and a really shitty Marvel controller).

    I'd like to get a 4770K and OC it to 4.3-4.4 which should suffice till Skylake and maybe beyond. :)

    • 

      _Bruce_ on 08/06/2013 - 18:03

      +1

      For most loads you current CPU and RAM and SATA-2 will NOT be the bottleneck. Your drives will be though.

      • 

        ThadtheChad on 08/06/2013 - 19:38

        Hey mate! :)

        The PC is primarily used for:

        1. Running VMs… multiple at a time (6-10). While the RAM is fine, the CPU does take a fair bit of a beating if there is high load on several VMs at once.

        2. Gaming! Suffice to say that my 670 should be alright for now (looking to grab another one for SLI once prices drop). I would think 2x GTX 670 will get bottlenecked by the i5 760.

        3. AV encoding. I have multiple devices that do not support the format that I store my multimedia content at. So I need on the fly re-encoding for streaming. Also, sometimes I'm required to use

        4. FDE: By virtue of my "industry domain", I will benefit greatly from the 10x improvement in AES encryption/decryption workloads.

        5. My motherboard has limited ports at the moment for SATA (and plugging SSDs to the Marvel controller causes heaps of errors/instability). So there is pretty much 100% utilisation of all ports at the moment. Also I have only 2x USB 3 ports; both of which are at the back (very annoying!).

        This is my business case. :)

      • 

        _Bruce_ on 08/06/2013 - 20:33

        +1

        Fair enough, your usage is definitely not 'most' people.

        I would definitely plan for a move to SSD none the less.

      • 

        ThadtheChad on 08/06/2013 - 21:42

        Thanks mate! :)

        I've already got 2x SSDs in my rig at the moment. 1x Intel 520 (120GB) for OS and apps. 1x Sandisk Extreme (120GB) purely for games.

        I'd love to get my hands on a 512GB SSD when it's a bit more reasonable and make that my primary drive. 120GB is tiny. I cannot even begin to imagine how people use 60GB OS drives.

• 

  p1 ama on 09/06/2013 - 09:40

  +1

  As with most of the time MSY has pretty reasonable prices, they're not always the cheapest for EVERYTHING, but when you add up everything, they tend to come out cheaper than other places such as Umart, Centrecom or CPL.

  $384 for the i7 4770K is the cheapest I've seen anywhere, so get that from MSY. They don't stock the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme though, so maybe shop around for that.

  Staticice is your friend :)

  Anyway, anybody saying that the i5 760 -> i7 4770K upgrade will be small should have a look at http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/191?vs=836 - shows that there's hefty performances across the board, especially video encoding and file compression.

  • 

    ThadtheChad on 09/06/2013 - 16:54

    I guess I'll have to fork up the "aussie tax" then. sigh

    The CPU is fine, only a mark-up of $40ish; but the motherboard is another $90. So I end up paying ~$130 extra (that could go towards a Coolermaster H100i or a new PSU).

• 

  ethereal88 on 10/06/2013 - 11:16

  Forget Haswell. I'd get a 3930K + Asrock Extreme 6 for that usage. SATA 3 isn't native but there are piles of ports for all your stuff.

• 

  tonyjzx on 10/06/2013 - 13:52

  i doubt you'll get any significant savings on haswell products now

  all the higher end cpus and boards are quite up there which is expected since its about a week old?

• 

  scrimshaw on 10/06/2013 - 20:50

  How about a Xeon E3? Coupled with a now aging but cheaper Z77 motherboard, it should give you the 8-thread spec that your VM's require, except it has no overclocking and no IGP.

  Xeon E3 1230V2 is around $250, which is a $134 cheaper than Haswel i7. In terms of performance, this xeon is on-par with i7-3770 (it just lacks IGP, but topside of that is that it runs cooler)
  Benchmark
  http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7…
  http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3…