Upgrade From Lenovo LGA 1155 Q87 Motherboard Using Existing i7-4790 CPU

[donchicago48]

Budget (including currency): $600 USD

Country: United States of America

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Video Editing and some drawing

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): I would like to handle video files from 2K Security Cameras. so that may take a dedicated video card and a new monitor.

I have an aging Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 Tower with an Intel Core i7-4790 CPU, Intel Q87 Chipset, 32 Gb SDRAM (4 X 8GB DDR3 1600), Samsung 1 Tb 980 SSD drive in an M.2 NVME adapter card, 1 TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD, and CPU built-in graphics running Windows 10. I do not play video games. The only really taxing thing I do is editing large video files. I would like to upgrade the motherboard to one with more modern specs e.g. Z87 Chipset or better, M.2 NVME Socket, etc. Would it be possible to boot from the Samsung 980 SSD with this CPU and an appropriate BIOS??

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

I believe Z97, which supports your CPU, is the first chipset to support booting from NVME.

[Kisai]

7 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

I believe Z97, which supports your CPU, is the first chipset to support booting from NVME.

Z87 will, but depends on the motherboard.

 

Personally (my system died with the z87, i7-4770, 32GB-1600 DDR3) I'd suggest replacing it. You can buy a 11th gen cpu, motherboard and ram, and unfortunately that's the lion's share of the cost. The i7-11700k, 32GB DDR4-3200, and a z590 MB cost $1500CDN. Now you don't necessarily need that much, but you don't really gain much if you stay on a 4-core system, maybe gain 25-50% core speed, but the old NVMe won't be any faster. You don't need an i9, or really even an i7, as an i5-10600K is a 6-core and that still gets you 50% more cores than where the quad-core you have is. 

 

Heck I can actually prove it because of an argument I had with someone else on the forum.

 

This is the speed of the WD NVMe drive, it's essentially unchanged from the i7-4770 with the z87. 

 

 

And this is the Crucial SATA SSD.

 

Now, depending on what drive you installed the OS on originally, booting it is possible, but maybe problematic if you installed the OS to the SATA drive at any point, as the boot record will be on that drive (which is why I had to wipe both drives, and install to the NVMe drive without any other drive present.) If you only installed the OS originally to the NVMe drive, then it will boot without a problem, without even reinstalling the OS.

 

[donchicago48]

i ran CrystalDiskMark on my daily use system, (i7-3770 CPU, 32 Gb SDRAM) which has a Hajan 128 Gb SATA Boot Drive C: and a Samsung 980 SSD Drive G:. Result screenshots follow: