How to upgrade

[vladonizer]

Right now I'm running an Intel 6800k and want to upgrade to something with more cores. I'm between looking for a used 6950x, used xeon cpu or swapping out my motherboard, cpu and ram altogether to the latest chipset. What would you recommend?

[RONOTHAN##]

Unless you get that 6950X for dirt cheap or have a use case that scales linearly with more cores and get the Xeon for cheap, sell the board/CPU/RAM and get something new. Intel 12th gen has such better single thread performance that even in multi threaded applications something like the i5 12400 will perform about the same as the 6950x. If you wanna talk old Xeons, the Xeon E5 2699A V4 (the 22 core top of the line chip for the socket) is outperformed by the i7 12700, while you're able to buy the board and CPU for less money than just the cost of the Xeon on eBay (going by US prices). If you do a lot of virtualization and need the ton of threads, still go for one of the newer gen CPUs. The Ryzen 9 CPUs do great with virtualization tasks since they've got a lot of threads, you don't have to deal with P cores and E cores, and they do have some single core muscle. 

 

 

Basically, unless you get something for criminally cheap, just sell your stuff and go current gen (if you really just need threads, maybe used 3950X)

[vladonizer]

5 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Unless you get that 6950X for dirt cheap or have a use case that scales linearly with more cores and get the Xeon for cheap, sell the board/CPU/RAM and get something new. Intel 12th gen has such better single thread performance that even in multi threaded applications something like the i5 12400 will perform about the same as the 6950x. If you wanna talk old Xeons, the Xeon E5 2699A V4 (the 22 core top of the line chip for the socket) is outperformed by the i7 12700, while you're able to buy the board and CPU for less money than just the cost of the Xeon on eBay (going by US prices). If you do a lot of virtualization and need the ton of threads, still go for one of the newer gen CPUs. The Ryzen 9 CPUs do great with virtualization tasks since they've got a lot of threads, you don't have to deal with P cores and E cores, and they do have some single core muscle. 

 

 

Basically, unless you get something for criminally cheap, just sell your stuff and go current gen (if you really just need threads, maybe used 3950X)

In your opinion is the new Intel cpus or and better?

[RONOTHAN##]

2 hours ago, vladonizer said:

In your opinion is the new Intel cpus or and better?

It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I'd probably be waiting for AM5 later this year before buying anything since I do a lot of virtualization, and P and E cores don't do well with virtualiation. Intel CPUs are faster than everything but the 5950X in everything but a few workloads, as well as being cheaper for the same equivalent performance. Unless you have a reason not to, I'd go Alder Lake, but there are reasons a number of reasons to avoid it depending on your use case (It's very hot so SFF builds are very impractical with the 12900k, you have to run Windows 11 for the best performance, the heterogeneous architecture is new and you're an early adopter, some things just universally run faster on AMD CPUs, etc.). 

 

You can't really go wrong with either, though I'd try to go alder lake unless you have a specific reason not to. 

[vladonizer]

21 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I'd probably be waiting for AM5 later this year before buying anything since I do a lot of virtualization, and P and E cores don't do well with virtualiation. Intel CPUs are faster than everything but the 5950X in everything but a few workloads, as well as being cheaper for the same equivalent performance. Unless you have a reason not to, I'd go Alder Lake, but there are reasons a number of reasons to avoid it depending on your use case (It's very hot so SFF builds are very impractical with the 12900k, you have to run Windows 11 for the best performance, the heterogeneous architecture is new and you're an early adopter, some things just universally run faster on AMD CPUs, etc.). 

 

You can't really go wrong with either, though I'd try to go alder lake unless you have a specific reason not to. 

I believe alder lake would work just fine for me because my biggest use cases are gaming and some video editing