Upgrading/replacing an 8+ year old rig

[Curious Pineapple]

I've managed to stretch over 8 years out of my museum-piece of a machine. Sporting a magnificent Q8200 combined with a mind blowing N9500GT GPU. Still happy with it's performance, but I have a feeling the old pile is not long for this world.

 

It's getting picky about RAM. I ran 8GB for years with no problem, and it started crashing and refusing to POST. Narrowed it down to a pair of sticks that work fine in everything else I've tested them in, but this board just doesn't like them after years of trouble-free use. I'm also starting mobile app development, and have no CPU support for SLAT in any LGA775 packaged processor, so Hyper-V and the device emulators in Visual Studio are a no-go.

 

I'm torn between buying something like an ITX board with soldered-down APU that's of similar performance to what I have now, or spending more than double, and building a complete new system with an FX-6300 (mainly as it comes bundled with a free 128GB SSD).

 

It's been many years (as you can probably guess given my current hardware) since I have built a machine. Last time I built from scratch was back when bigger numbers meant faster, and more clock speed did actually mean more power. I'm unsure as what socket to choose, what CPU range to choose in that socket and then what actual CPU will give me the best performance for the cost. I'm happy to overclock, and even take a chance on unlocking cores to get the most performance for my money, but could do with some advice on which way to go

 

I'm reluctant to spend a whole lot as I'm not upgrading for performance, but rather for one CPU feature (that the device emulators in VS don't even use), and support for more RAM.

 

Any help will be appreciated

[NinjaJc01]

1 minute ago, Curious Pineapple said:

I've managed to stretch over 8 years out of my museum-piece of a machine. Sporting a magnificent Q8200 combined with a mind blowing N9500GT GPU. Still happy with it's performance, but I have a feeling the old pile is not long for this world.

 

It's getting picky about RAM. I ran 8GB for years with no problem, and it started crashing and refusing to POST. Narrowed it down to a pair of sticks that work fine in everything else I've tested them in, but this board just doesn't like them after years of trouble-free use. I'm also starting mobile app development, and have no CPU support for SLAT in any LGA775 packaged processor, so Hyper-V and the device emulators in Visual Studio are a no-go.

 

I'm torn between buying something like an ITX board with soldered-down APU that's of similar performance to what I have now, or spending more than double, and building a complete new system with an FX-6300 (mainly as it comes bundled with a free 128GB SSD).

 

It's been many years (as you can probably guess given my current hardware) since I have built a machine. Last time I built from scratch was back when bigger numbers meant faster, and more clock speed did actually mean more power. I'm unsure as what socket to choose, what CPU range to choose in that socket and then what actual CPU will give me the best performance for the cost. I'm happy to overclock, and even take a chance on unlocking cores to get the most performance for my money, but could do with some advice on which way to go

 

I'm reluctant to spend a whole lot as I'm not upgrading for performance, but rather for one CPU feature (that the device emulators in VS don't even use), and support for more RAM.

 

Any help will be appreciated

Use PC part picker to design yourself a build. If you are in the UK, CEX sell HDDs, RAM and CPUs cheap with a 2 year warranty.

[Curious Pineapple]

I've bought many parts from CEX, got my Q8200 from there last year. Been looking at the FX CPU's, quite cheap but a lot of people say they usually arrive with bent pins.

 

So far I have the FX-6300, Integral 128GB SSD (free with CPU), Gigabyte GA-78LMT board and a pair of Cruical Ballistix 8GB sticks. CPU is £35 more new, but comes with cooler and the SSD.

 

Going to use my current case/PSU, the boards integrated Radeon 3000 graphics and my current hdd's for data (use the SSD for O/S).

 

Don't think I can go wrong with the AM3+ platform, but then again, I went for socket 754 and bought the Athlon 64 3200+, only to have socket 939 appear and make my brand new gear pretty much obsolete.

 

[stconquest]

11 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

I've bought many parts from CEX, got my Q8200 from there last year. Been looking at the FX CPU's, quite cheap but a lot of people say they usually arrive with bent pins.

 

So far I have the FX-6300, Integral 128GB SSD (free with CPU), Gigabyte GA-78LMT board and a pair of Cruical Ballistix 8GB sticks. CPU is £35 more new, but comes with cooler and the SSD.

 

Going to use my current case/PSU, the boards integrated Radeon 3000 graphics and my current hdd's for data (use the SSD for O/S).

 

Don't think I can go wrong with the AM3+ platform, but then again, I went for socket 754 and bought the Athlon 64 3200+, only to have socket 939 appear and make my brand new gear pretty much obsolete.

 

How much do you want to spend?

 

Why are you going from an old platform LGA 775, to an old platform AM3+?  The FX chips are 4-5 years old.  They are slow and power hungry.  That is a bad decision.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor  (£96.23 @ CCL Computers)
Motherboard: ASRock H110M-ITX Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard  (£58.15 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£33.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Patriot Torch LE 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  (£48.99 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £237.36
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-26 19:26 BST+0100

 

 

[Curious Pineapple]

£200, maybe just a bit over

 

I've not really looked an Intel much as I'm looking more at performance for the price, rather than the highest possible performance, or lowest power consumption. I don't even know if the whole AMD gives more for your money holds true any more though! I'm running a Core 2 Quad at the moment and I'm perfectly happy with it's performance. Perfectly fine for the light gaming I do and compiles code fast enough, I'm just being forced to upgrade to use device emulators. I'm going from LGA755, but I thought the AM3+ was the latest AMD platform. Just getting confused over which platform to go for. Not keep up to date with latest hardware developments as I've spent the last few years working with embedded hardware and 20+ year old microcontroller architectures, and not really considered an upgrade of this machine until a few weeks ago when I found out about the SLAT requirement for Hyper-V.

[stconquest]

33 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

£200, maybe just a bit over

 

I've not really looked an Intel much as I'm looking more at performance for the price, rather than the highest possible performance, or lowest power consumption. I don't even know if the whole AMD gives more for your money holds true any more though! I'm running a Core 2 Quad at the moment and I'm perfectly happy with it's performance. Perfectly fine for the light gaming I do and compiles code fast enough, I'm just being forced to upgrade to use device emulators. I'm going from LGA755, but I thought the AM3+ was the latest AMD platform. Just getting confused over which platform to go for. Not keep up to date with latest hardware developments as I've spent the last few years working with embedded hardware and 20+ year old microcontroller architectures, and not really considered an upgrade of this machine until a few weeks ago when I found out about the SLAT requirement for Hyper-V.

AMD has not made any real jumps in performance since the FX launch... even before that.  The Phenom II X6 line will keep up with the FX line in performance; both single threaded and multi threaded workloads.

 

For your use, the multi thread capabilities of the FX 6XXX or FX 8XXX might mean you are correct in getting the most out of your money.  A modern Xeon will outperform the FX 8XXX (ofc, the FX 6XXX as well) in both gaming and compiling code:  

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor  (£209.24 @ BT Shop)
Motherboard: ASRock H97M Anniversary Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard  (£60.48 @ More Computers)
Total: £269.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-26 20:19 BST+0100

 

The i3 build above will absolutely destroy the FX series unless a program requires more than four threads.  ...and it does it with a much lower power draw (less heat). 

 

 

[Curious Pineapple]

I'm looking at that i3 system, I may get something similar, or get a lower end Pentium CPU for that socket, as they seem to be faster than my Q8200 for single threaded applications, so I won't notice any slow down from what I have now, and I can upgrade to an i3/5/7 at a later date if I need a bit more power out of it

 

 

[stconquest]

1 hour ago, Curious Pineapple said:

I'm looking at that i3 system, I may get something similar, or get a lower end Pentium CPU for that socket, as they seem to be faster than my Q8200 for single threaded applications, so I won't notice any slow down from what I have now, and I can upgrade to an i3/5/7 at a later date if I need a bit more power out of it

 

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G4400 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor  (£49.12 @ CCL Computers)
Motherboard: ASRock H110M-HDS Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  (£44.43 @ BT Shop)
Memory: Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£33.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Patriot Torch LE 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  (£48.99 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £176.53
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-26 23:45 BST+0100

 

Because of the inexpensive RAM, going 2x8GB is the smart thing to do.  You will gain performance from the increased capacity (8GB sticks over 4GB sticks), and the dual channel bandwidth.  Better performance than having 2x4GB or 1x8GB.

 

Going Skylake also means better iGPU performance with the faster RAM (2133MHz).  That is also another reason to get the 16GB of RAM.