Upgrading from Xeon

[TravisTea]

I'm on a budget and am looking to upgrade my Xeon 3520 to an i5 4460. I currently have my cpu OC'd at 3.8 ghz. I should also note that I'm using a gtx 970. Will I see much improvement going to this cpu, or will it be a waste of money? I mainly game, watch movies, and do some minor video encoding. I don't really care to OC, which is why I also looked at this particular cpu. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

**Also, I was also considering an FX 8320. I feel like I wouldn't gain anything from that though. Feel free to input on this as well.

[ZetZet]

I think the Xeon is still powerful enough to not bottleneck 970... and for video stuffs more cores should be better.

[WereCat]

I dont think its worth it to upgrade. Just keep it.

[TravisTea]

You don't think the single core performance would help at all with games?

[runit3]

You don't think the single core performance would help at all with games?

When I moved from 1366 (i7-980X OC'd) to 1150 (i5's - i7 & X's OC'd) I saw a marked increase in general performance across the board. Gaming, not so much, depending on the game(s) you play. If they're heavily CPU dependent yes, they will run better on Haswell/1150. That being said, they certainly won't run any better on the FX's. If you're looking for MMO/ARMA3/DAY-Z/etc. performance you may, at the very most, pick up 5-15fps, but it's not going to be earth shattering. For core optimized games you won't see a bit of difference.

 

If you have a board that supports SATA III, and you don't have the OS on an SSD, getting a fresh OS install on a decent SSD will bring back some of that "fresh PC smell" and net you some snappyness while doing day-to-day tasks. When I originally built my 1366 it was on a terrible first gen SSD (250 r/w), changing out for an 840 EVO made a world of difference before I gave the rig away.

 

Best suggestion I could give, if you have the cash and find your general performance or CPU game performance lacking convert the 1366 build into a FreeNAS or home server build and move on up to Haswell, you won't regret it. *edit* if you're looking at i5's I would keep the Xeon around for encoding, it should still outperform any of the i5 line in that.

[Sadistic_Potato]

Well...the Xeon won't bottleneck modern games if you get a decent GPU, but if you feel like you want to move I guess it's still OK. But maybe, as @runit3 said, you could convert the Xeon into some kind of NAS or Encoding-only build? Because it kind of sounds like a waste to throw away that Xeon, because it'll still outperform any i5 in video encoding. 

[TravisTea]

Ok so it sounds like I'm fine with what I currently have. Let me ask this then. I'm getting a Samsung Evo 250gb ssd. My motherboard doesn't have Sata III, will I notice a drastic decrease in performance, or will it be similar to PCI-E 2.0 and 3.0 where it won't be noticeable at all? Also, I have 6gbs of ram. Should I make the jump to 12gbs? Or would that be pointless too? I don't play MMOs or anything like Arma. Probably the most CPU intensive game I'll play is BF4 or Planetary Annihilation.