Should I get an old CPU instead of a new one?

TukangUsapEmenq · May 20, 2022

In a nutshell, I planned to upgrade my PC later on. Specs right now as below.

Intel Xeon E3-1225 v2 3.2 GHz 4C/4T CPU

ASRock B75M Motherboard

Hynix 8 GB + Team Group 4 GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM (will go for total 16 GB later, relax)

be quiet! System Power 9 500W PSU

As part of the upgrade per-step, I'll get a RX 570 later, after that I'll upgrade the CPU. Use-case is for gaming after work in 1366x768 monitor (will onto 1080p later on), little video editing, 2D/3D CAD works. What made me skeptical is the pick between Xeon E3-1240 v2 or i7-3770 or i3-10105F.

If I pick the Xeon E3-1240 v2, or i7-3770 either, well, it's obvious, it's an kind-of ancient processor with some of the recent CPU instruction are not there (AVX2), way slower clock speed, potentially will get some hiccups in gaming, but I saw some gameplay videos and I thought it's already good enough and I didn't see too much bottleneck, and it seems it'll already fulfil my needs. Plus, the fact I won't need to upgrade the others (mobo and RAM) would be a huge plus.

If I pick the i3-10105F, price's a bit higher (around $21-ish than the Xeon). But the biggest struggle is that I have to change both RAM and motherboard, and I don't know how really 'far' the performance gap between those. To be honest, I wouldn't mind to take few percent of performance loss between generation as long as I got 60 fps in decent graphics anyway.

Well, I guess, enlighten me of this confusion. Thanks in advance.

jaslion · May 20, 2022

The 3770 is becoming a not good enough for gaming cpu at 60fps. So I would not get a cpu of that class. The I3 is a ton faster already.

But honestly I'd save up for now and look at the used market for when am5 hit people are already upgrading quite a bit to 12TH gen and am5 is only going to increase the upgrade cycle meaning a lot more used hardware.

YoungBlade · May 20, 2022

I wouldn't bother with a bunch of piecemeal upgrades on such an old platform. Your Xeon isn't really going to hold you back much more than a 4c/8t chip will from the same generation. The low single-core performance is a bigger problem than the lack of threads when it comes to the actual editing process. When it comes to rendering the video, you'd be better off getting a GPU that supports encoding anyway. And your platform doesn't support NVMe drives, which would really help with things like video scrubbing.

Unless you can get one of those 4c/8t chips for very cheap, I'd just save up to upgrade the entire platform.

I also wouldn't invest into the LGA 1200 socket platform with any 10th or 11th gen chip, as it honestly sucks - your best upgrade options are either a 10c/20t CPU that's powerful, but lacks PCIe Gen 4, or an 8c/16t CPU that's less powerful, except that it sucks down more power, but has PCIe Gen 4. Also, if you go with a B460, H470, H410, or H510 motherboard, you don't get memory overclocking. Frankly, the whole platform is stupid and emblematic of everything that was wrong about 2015-2021 Intel.

If you need to upgrade today, unless pricing in your region is completely out of whack, you should either go with 12th gen Intel or the AM4 platform. Nothing else is really worth considering. If you must go with 10th gen due to pricing, please at least get a B560, Z490, or Z590 board so that you have the ability to run memory faster than DDR4-2666.

TukangUsapEmenq · May 20, 2022

53 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

I wouldn't bother with a bunch of piecemeal upgrades on such an old platform. Your Xeon isn't really going to hold you back much more than a 4c/8t chip will from the same generation. The low single-core performance is a bigger problem than the lack of threads when it comes to the actual editing process. When it comes to rendering the video, you'd be better off getting a GPU that supports encoding anyway. And your platform doesn't support NVMe drives, which would really help with things like video scrubbing.

Well, I don't edit too much (like, only 2-4 hours in one month, hence I said little) and I mostly only limit it on 1080p anyway. Even on my current state I'm still good enough with the editing performance despite.... QSV are actually not usable on this CPU, despite it's there. Wtf Intel. And I'm still happy enough with my SATA SSD tbh.

53 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Unless you can get one of those 4c/8t chips for very cheap, I'd just save up to upgrade the entire platform.

Could sell my 1225 and actually get the 1240 with $14 gap between them. Although I'd agree with you to save up for another entire platform later on.

53 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

I also wouldn't invest into the LGA 1200 socket platform with any 10th or 11th gen chip, as it honestly sucks - your best upgrade options are either a 10c/20t CPU that's powerful, but lacks PCIe Gen 4, or an 8c/16t CPU that's less powerful, except that it sucks down more power, but has PCIe Gen 4. Also, if you go with a B460, H470, H410, or H510 motherboard, you don't get memory overclocking. Frankly, the whole platform is stupid and emblematic of everything that was wrong about 2015-2021 Intel.

I actually oversighted about this. Thanks for the enlighten that I'll skip Gen 10/11 chips then. To be honest I don't really want to get overkill, so 6C/12T or even that 8C/16T later on perhaps.

53 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

If you need to upgrade today, unless pricing in your region is completely out of whack, you should either go with 12th gen Intel or the AM4 platform. Nothing else is really worth considering. If you must go with 10th gen due to pricing, please at least get a B560, Z490, or Z590 board so that you have the ability to run memory faster than DDR4-2666.

Currently I'm prioritizing to get a decent GPU (RX 570 for now, but I could go for RX 6500 XT or even RX 6600) first for my current setup (well I'm, improving it slowly), but I guess I'll go either Gen 3/4 Ryzen 3/5 or i3 Alder Lake later on then.

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2 hours ago, jaslion said:

But honestly I'd save up for now and look at the used market for when am5 hit people are already upgrading quite a bit to 12TH gen and am5 is only going to increase the upgrade cycle meaning a lot more used hardware.

Well, unfortunately here PCs are actually some kind of "treasure" here that there's barely any secondhand items around. Even if so, it won't go as cheap as kind-of close to brand new.