Upgrade Trends

[patrickjp93]

What's your current chip (and setup if you want)? And, what architecture do you think you will hold out for until you upgrade?

For me, I held out from a Q9550 (Yorkfield) until the launch of the 4960x (Ivy Bridge) which I intend to keep until the successor to Cannonlake/-E depending on whether or not onboard graphics end up powerful enough to do most everything I want. We should see 6-core mainstream chips at that point too, with higher clock rates than the 5930k.

[Jodomcfrodo]

I have a 4770k and 780ti.

In 2017 I'm hoping to build another before I head off to college. So what ever is good at that time. 

[MegaDave91]

Rig in sig

 

Next cpu upgrade will be Broadwell.

[M-ursu]

Now: Kepler and Haswell

Soon: Maxwell and Broadwell

[MegaDave91]

I have a 4770k and 780ti.

In 2017 I'm hoping to build another before I head off to college. So what ever is good at that time. 

Why is your 4770k at stock? 

[Str_Mape]

FX 8120 and a GTX 590 with a 7770 to run aux monitors for less vRAM issues.
Sometime next year I plan on a new build, i5 or i7 with dual 290's or 390's depending on price down here along with adding more drives to my already fairly large set.
My upgrade plans were delayed since I'm flying to Australia for PAX later this year.

[DeViLzzz]

I have an i5 2500k and GTX 670 currently and I don't see an upgrade in the near future.  I think it will be Christmas of 2016 before I can upgrade again.  Quite honestly though I really don't need an upgrade with all the back log of games I have that run perfectly well on ultra settings at 1080p with the rig I have.  I also was not looking to go 4k with a tv or monitor because I can't afford the hardware to run games at that resolution at acceptable framerates.

[Clyne]

FX 8320 And R9 270X, I will build another computer when i going to collage in 2019, I choose a Intel cpu or AMD cpu depending on my budget. 

[Jodomcfrodo]

Why is your 4770k at stock? 

It can't get past 4.3ghz even with 1.4v. I have to be do something wrong considering it reaches 4.2ghz at stock so I just didn't bother. If I don't know what I'm doing I should just leave it. I basically followed Linus' guide step by step and achieved the same instability at 4.3ghz 1.4v.

[harrynowl]

4690k and 7950 (280) 

 

don't intend to upgrade until 2017 unless this gpu blows up

[Jey R.]

Lol I just found this forum. Cool I have been so isolated from pc and laptops industry. Now I'm back and heading for possible upgrades and learn the new stuff.

I still have my classic i7 920 with gtx 275, got gtx 760 SC recently. But man now that I think about it, that chip had held for about 7-8 years very solid and not problem what soever. But I think it's for upgrade Lol. And checking what's coming up I want to make the right jump.

What you think guys, maybe you can help me.

Got i7 920 and gtx 760 with gtx 275 (old)

Jump to ; Maxwell and broadwell

Or willing to wait for skylike or broadwell e. For future proofing. I would be willing to wait another year with my current setup.

[patrickjp93]

I was surprised by the two who were 1 or 2-year upgraders. That gets darn expensive... Devil and Bubble seemed the most sensible to me, though I know I held out a long time, but workstation needs could not support such an old beast any longer. I'm a bit miffed DDR4 is coming on the 5th gen extreme series, and PCIe 4 is coming with Skylake, but I also know I'm fine with what I have until prices come down on both techs. Hell maybe thunderbolt will replace USB by the time of Cannonlake's successor and make my MacBook Pro more relevant beyond my Master's thesis.

Of course, chipset and CPU support for vastly more PCIe lanes will have to greatly expand for thunderbolt to go mainstream. Cut back USB allocation and make it happen Intel! Who could possibly need 10 USB 3.0 ports AND 6 USB 2.0 ports?! Also, I wish we had USB 3.1 external hdd enclosures... I miss my eSATA backup speed. My dog broke my only eSATA port on my MOBO... Much sadness ;(

[harrynowl]

I was surprised by the two who were 1 or 2-year upgraders. That gets darn expensive... Devil and Bubble seemed the most sensible to me, though I know I held out a long time, but workstation needs could not support such an old beast any longer. I'm a bit miffed DDR4 is coming on the 5th gen extreme series, and PCIe 4 is coming with Skylake, but I also know I'm fine with what I have until prices come down on both techs. Hell maybe thunderbolt will replace USB by the time of Cannonlake's successor and make my MacBook Pro more relevant beyond my Master's thesis.

Most people aren't on extreme edition / extreme platforms though so the bomb cost is about the same

[patrickjp93]

-snip-

Skylake since by then DDR4 prices will have come down. We may see some 6-core mainstream chips too, but I can't guarantee that. Also, PCIe4 will be implemented, making it more future-proof than Broadwell, which may only release laptop parts at the rate things are going. Skylake suffered no delays, but Broadwell got pushed way back to this Christmas. There may be no Broadwell-E at all.

[Jey R.]

Will skylake support ddr4 out of the box? Yes I'm sure ddr4 will be a little more affordable by 2015 q3

So aim for x99 boards then?

[Jade]

When there's afforable DDR4. Going to likely build an entirely new PC for that, then probably turn this one into a NAS /Folding machine.

[patrickjp93]

Will skylake support ddr4 out of the box? Yes I'm sure ddr4 will be a little more affordable by 2015 q3So aim for x99 boards then?

X99 support DDR4 out of the box is for Haswell-E. Skylake is the successor to Broadwell (was supposed to be anyway, may be Haswell's Desktop and Broadwell's mobile successor now) and is guaranteed to be DDR4-compatible out of the box. That will be Z107/170 or X109 if you wait all the way to Skylake-E.

[Jey R.]

Well, it is between z97 chipset or maybe wait a little for x99 chipset to get the new cpu, ram and mobo altogether

[Syraz]

Honestly, I run a c2d e7400, Its now showing it's age for me to warrant an upgrade.  I still in air about going overboard and wait for X99 or go for a haswell refresh..maybe will see how funds pan out and go from their

[patrickjp93]

Honestly, I run a c2d e7400, Its now showing it's age for me to warrant an upgrade. I still in air about going overboard and wait for X99 or go for a haswell refresh..maybe will see how funds pan out and go from their

What have I done? Now this thread is turning into advice for all sorts of people. Do you need 6 cores? If you won't for the foreseeable future, I'd say check how many PCIe lanes you need next (more than 24? Go x99). Then, if the previous parenthetical quote ends up not pertaining to you, check and see if you can get away with onboard graphics. The 4790k is beautiful all around, but obviously expandability is limited. I'm miffed there are no quad-cores in the Haswell-E lineup. Single-threaded performance still matters in a lot of games, and we deserve a 4.5 GHz base clock CPU to make AMD fan children cry.

[SpecTre12345]

Depends on what the performance increases are. I want to say I would wait until Skylake, but how much of a performance increase is it going to be. Nobody really knows. Sandy to Ivy was 10%, Ivy to Haswell was 10%, Haswell to Broadwell will probably be another 10%. So Broadwell to Skylake would have to be at least 20% increase before it would actually give a Sandy Bridge owner a meaningful upgrade because then that's at least a 50% increase in IPC. Then the next question is, well even though it has a 50% increase in IPC over Sandy Bridge. What are the gaming performance differences? Even an overclocked i7-920 still holds its own in games, and that came out in 2008. Yet, Bloomfield to Haswell is a decent amount of increase in IPC, but in games today an overclocked 920 is still fine. Just looking at CPU benchmarks you can see that the 920 is hardly a bottleneck in games. Haswell came out in 2013, so that's a five year difference and still the five year old CPU is doing fine in games. If gaming is not your primary usage of your computer then the IPC increases from Bloomfield to Haswell would probably benefit you. However, from a gamer's standpoint it seems that a Sandy Bridge owner has a solid investment in their CPU assuming it can last five years.

 

As far as GPU's go, I like to get about two years out of my GPU. I'll probably go with a 800 series a few months before the 900 series drops. 

[patrickjp93]

Depends on what the performance increases are. I want to say I would wait until Skylake, but how much of a performance increase is it going to be. Nobody really knows. Sandy to Ivy was 10%, Ivy to Haswell was 10%, Haswell to Broadwell will probably be another 10%. So Broadwell to Skylake would have to be at least 20% increase before it would actually give a Sandy Bridge owner a meaningful upgrade because then that's at least a 50% increase in IPC. Then the next question is, well even though it has a 50% increase in IPC over Sandy Bridge. What are the gaming performance differences? Even an overclock i7-920 still holds its own in games, and that came out in 2008. Yet, Bloomfield to Haswell is a decent amount of increase in IPC, but in games today an overclocked 920 is still fine. Just looking at CPU benchmarks you can see that the 920 is hardly a bottleneck in games. Haswell came out in 2013, so that's a five year difference and still the five year old CPU is doing fine in games. If gaming is not your primary usage of your computer then the IPC increases from Bloomfield to Haswell would probably benefit you. However, from a gamer's standpoint it seems that a Sandy Bridge owner has a solid investment in their CPU assuming it can last five years.

As far as GPU's go, I like to get about two years out of my GPU. I'll probably go with a 800 series a few months before the 900 series drops.

Game engines are finally moving to greater core-count needs, so the I7 920 is at the end of its usefulness by Cannonlake (mainstream hex-core chips woot!), but unless games take advantage of heterogeneous architecture like HSA and Intel's SIMD (SSE, AVX, etc.), then Intel has already pretty much perfected the basic integer instructions most games use. An 8-core version of the I7 920 with a clock rate of 3 GHz and 20MB of cache would do pretty much as well in games as the 5960x is going to.

[GangstaRas]

right now in the transition of shifting the e2180 into a i3 3240 paired with a 750 ti (dont got the mobo or gpu yet to complete the switch). id want that last me till 2018. im willing to change the gpu earlier but not the cpu until its 100% struggling (like what black ops did when it came out even though that game was beyond broken)

[Thorium19]

When I've finished my rig (build log in sig) then I shall try to hold out besides going to broadwell a few months after it's out and getting an nvidia 800 series card when they start dropping in price until around 2017 or so, unless I am forced to upgrade due to incompatibilities or the death of parts.

[SpecTre12345]

Game engines are finally moving to greater core-count needs, so the I7 920 is at the end of its usefulness by Cannonlake (mainstream hex-core chips woot!), but unless games take advantage of heterogeneous architecture like HSA and Intel's SIMD (SSE, AVX, etc.), then Intel has already pretty much perfected the basic integer instructions most games use. An 8-core version of the I7 920 with a clock rate of 3 GHz and 20MB of cache would do pretty much as well in games as the 5960x is going to.

 

As much as I see games being able to take advantage of more cores and/or threads in the future I still have reservations about it becoming something that is going to be required to have a good experience. Meaning, say an engine can fully utilize 6-8 cores in the future, how many frames difference are we talking about between a CPU with only four cores and CPU's with 6 or 8 cores. Right now in games like Crysis 3, Metro Last Light, and BF4 which are engines that utilize extra cores and threads we still don't see that big of a difference between a four core chip and a six core chip. So what exactly would have to change to force people to need a mainstream hexa-core chip for solely gaming. Cannonlake isn't supposed to arrive until about 2016 and is also supposed to be only a die shrink from Skylake like Haswell to Broadwell. I still doubt consumer/main stream hexa-core chips arriving by this time because I still find it unnecessary. Additionally, this is also only two years away, I don't see computing making a progressive turn this abruptly to where hexa-core chips even if possibly released catch on so quickly.