Help! Feeling upgrade itch but can't justify it

[Cisco99]

I've been running my Bloomfield i7-930 @ 4.00 GHz for nearly 3 years now. I keep looking around and comparing benchmarks and I just can't find much reason to upgrade to one of the new i7s... even the i7-3770k, as nice as it is, would give me just a slight increase...barely noticeable in games which is the one thing I use it for that pushes the boundaries...photoshop, lightroom etc. are doing just fine with what I have

Everything else in my system--GPU, SSDs, etc.--is pretty well up to date... I can't remember the last time that I had a CPU last me this long...it's definitely a nice "problem" to have :)

Any worthy CPU upgrades on the horizon?

[great_big_abyss]

..Haswell? It may be the only thing at this point that will give you a noticeable performance increase.

[JayDeeHobbit]

Haha... I was feeling exactly the same way about my over 4 year old i7 920 and posted this thread awhile ago:
Am I getting old or is the i7 920 just that good?

I broke down and bought a new rig last week. (should get it next week)

Hope you have more will power than I do.

[pitz]

Yeah probably not worth putting any money into the CPU. I've personally focussed most of my efforts on upgrades that will improve system reliability, such as RAID-10 array, hotswap backplane, etc.

Do you have a server or a NAS? Centralizing all your storage is very convenient. I even run virtual machines, a number of servers, and MythTV on my server/NAS.

[Dragonstongue]

current gen sandy and ivy are faster clock per clock, but not a very large difference in outright performance, just a bump and by far more power efficent, so is it worth it, not technically. It would be like going from a Radeon 7850 to a 7870 at stock clocks, faster, but costly for that small bump as well, however, the top end chips being the E series, well they are quite a large bit faster if you are using what it gives to you.

[sswilson]

Maybe keep your eyes open for a used 980X rather than a whole platform upgrade?

This seems to be a theme going on recently, none of the new procs provide major performance upgrades, their real benefits are related to power usage.

[Bond007]

If you don't care about power keep what you have. Since you don't seem to feel you are missing out on anything with your current processor and haswell is SUPPOSEDLY being released in June I would wait until at least then to make any decisions. An upgrade like this is going to give you an improvement across the board, but nothing earth shattering. As mentioned before, the big change would be in power consumption. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say the CPU see close to a 50% reduction in power consumption once they are OCed.

[Dzzope]

I'm in the same boat.. Main reason I would upgrade at this point is for Trim...


I keep looking at what it would cost me to upgrade and the real-world performance difference.. and it just doesn't justify the cost for me.
IMO your better spending your money else-where or saving for Haswell and next gen card or possibly even skipping haswell...

[sourthings]

I had an i7 920 rig for a loooong while and managed to hold off through all the SB launches. Once SB-E came I just went ahead and upgraded. You've waited this long, at this point might as well wait a bit more and get a Haswell.

[Mark]

Just did the same. Was getting bored of the same old same old so was given the opportunity to upgrade and have fun. Picked a new ROG board V Assassin, some G.Skill Tridents and the Intel I73770k. Going back to watercool the cpu..working on some simple ideas to make it look good. Also picked up 2 Samsung Pro 256.

Why?..just a hobby :)