me_in_va

Thanks for the replies. A lot of you have said that I should change out the GPU. It is working fine for what I do. I'm not really much into gaming. This machine is primarily an editing computer. As I stated, I run FCS on it. I also have Adobe CS5 on it. They both run fine so all I am looking for is a boost in performance to make rendering go a little faster. I'll have to do some research to see if either software package would take advantage of 6 cores or if they are limited to using only up to 4 cores. I know that FCS only looks for the first four gig's of RAM and no more. So the 12GB I have doesn't get used to its fullest with some of the programs in that suite. And for the CS5 suite, I have no idea if RAM or CPU cores are limited by the software. Currently I am leaning toward the Xeon chips as they are priced better than the i7's. The specs on the Xeon's look pretty good and more importantly, the motherboard is compatible with them (or more correctly, the CPU's are compatible with the motherboard). Does anyone have any experience with the Xeon 56xx line vs the i7-990x? Did you try both? What differences did you find? Thanks, Me_In_Va

Yes, it is over clocked to 3.36GHz. I think the stock clock speed is 2.8GHz. Gaming isn't really on the plate for this machine. like I said, I do a little Minecraft. But only when time allows and I am in the mood. I'm not really into gaming. The main improvement I am looking for is in FCS. I also have Adobe CS5 on this machine and it gets some fair use as well. Just not as much as FCS.

I have an older system that I want to upgrade somehow. Right now this is what I have: i7 930 12GB 1333Mhz 1TB 7200rpm 512GB SSD 512GB hybrid Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT Gigabyte X58A-UD3R (I think that is the model of the board) I was thinking of upgrading just the CPU. There are plenty of 1366 socket CPU's out there for a decent price, other not so decent. And then on the other hand I was considering just building a new system from scratch. BUT...the finance department (wife) isn't too thrilled about $2,000+ going into a system that will have limited use. So upgrading just the CPU seems to be the wiser (and safer) option. The i7 990x is the 'highest' spec CPU that works on the same socket in the ix-core family. I have seen other CPU's with the same socket but i am not familiar with them. Is the Xeon line of CPU's the same as the ix-series? The Xeon chips seem to be going at a much lower price than the i7 990x chips. As for the use of this system, it is a dual boot system: Mac OS and Windows 10. On the Mac side I am running Final Cut Studio - not iMovie pro (FCX). On the Windows side, I just installed that and have not really done much with it yet. Gaming? I ran both Minecraft and a Minecraft server on the Mac side. The server went away when my nephew went to college. So this machine is not going to see a lot of action other than FCS. It would be nice if the upgrade(s) will let me run Fortnite but that isn't a deal breaker. My interest in that game has died off considerably. Anyway, would it yield much of an improvement to drop a new CPU into this old system? I don't want to spend a lot of money on this system as it really doesn't get much use. If it will give me a considerable boost then I might start using it a lot more. But if it is only a marginal improvement then I'll just wait on getting a newer laptop later and relegate this computer to some other use. Thanks! Me_In_Va