Cpu Upgrade for 7970

pyr0 · August 4, 2016

Hello.

I recently built a £155 PC for my friend with a Sapphire Dual-X HD 7970 and a xeon X5450. My friend was considering upgrading to a gtx 780 but I talked him out of that one as buying one to upgrade from a 7970 isn't worth it, even without that CPU. What Platform and CPU should my friend upgrade to? I am thinking X58 and a xeon X5640 or X5650, or lga 1155 with a 2500 or 2500k

Please bear in mind I would be doing the upgrade and I would buy my parts used, so an Athlon X4 860K or Pentium G3258 isn't what I'm after

Thanks in advance

RuLeZ · August 4, 2016

I would go for X5650, 2500k isnt enough anymore, but some games that just use 2-4threads can have poor performance.

Logarithm · August 4, 2016

I still think that the G3258 is a good idea, because it crushes.

What's the budget that your friend has?

Leadneck · August 4, 2016

Those Xeons use the same lithography as the 2500k and has a much lower clock. So it seems to me that the single-threaded performance would be much better on the 2500k.

However, it looks like the X5650 can be overclocked easily! So if you are willing to spend the time getting it as high as possible, then that is clearly the better choice! Think about all those cores at 4.5Ghz! Those 32nm CPUs still work great today with aggressive OCs on them.

pyr0 · August 4, 2016

11 minutes ago, Leadneck said:

Those Xeons use the same lithography as the 2500k and has a much lower clock. So it seems to me that the single-threaded performance would be much better on the 2500k.

However, it looks like the X5650 can be overclocked easily! So if you are willing to spend the time getting it as high as possible, then that is clearly the better choice! Think about all those cores at 4.5Ghz! Those 32nm CPUs still work great today with aggressive OCs on them.

OK, I'l suggest that to him. I will probably give him one of my old cases and watercool the CPU. He has a budget of around £200 so that would work.

SLAYR · August 4, 2016

57 minutes ago, RuLeZ said:

I would go for X5650, 2500k isnt enough anymore, but some games that just use 2-4threads can have poor performance.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs-Intel-Xeon-X5650/619vsm355

The 2500k is better then a 5650k for gaming, you already lose most of the performance of the 5650 as no games will use more then eight threads currently. So unless this is for rendering or something that can use the threads the i5 is better.