My PC is finally dying. Random crashes all the time, sometimes not even making it past the BIOS. I got no clue if it's the CPU, motherboard or RAM, it does not correlate with load or anything. That means after seven years it seems it is time to replace my trusty Q6600 with its 4GB of DDR2 . If i had the choice I would wait for Broadwell of course, but since I don't want to be months without a stable gaming PC that means I have to replace it with two year old Haswell tech, that costs more at the moment than when it was released. Problem: I can't really decide what to get. I hate buying soon to be outdated tech for full price. Use cases: Gaming, coding, fooling around with UE4, should serve me again for many years. Basically, it comes down to the following choices: The luxury package: The only CPU tech from Intel that won't be outdated in three months: Haswell-E A 5820K + Mobo + RAM = 600€ pro: new chipset, DDR4 RAM, 6 cores, gives me warm feeling con: I don't need that CPU power, expensive The master race option: i5-4690K = 390€ pro: can use my massive Noctua for overclocking, bang for buck con: only 4 threads may not be enough in the future, outdated chipset, RAM, etc The peasant solution: i5-4460 = 330€ Pro: cheap, good enough for now, something something time value of money Con: not exciting at all, I'd buy the same CPU as Spartacus The clever alternative: wait for Broadwell pro: 5% moar IPC, 30% less power consumption con: still months away, how to survive till 2015 What do?
Buy some super cheap used laptop or tablet and use that til broadwell hits? Check around, you may find someone selling something useable for like a 100 quid. I use a 2500k, and I don't think I'll need to upgrade for another 4-5 years before it'll feel a tad slow, or die out. I currently have nothing that truly taxes it, so even when I do find something that makes it chug a bit games and tasks should still work fine I feel. So getting haswell or something wouldn't be the end of the world really. There's the thought that when broad well hits newer graphic cards will come out, making previous stuff cheaper. Ram might also be cheaper. Who knows what the future holds?
This is a weird time to buy a pc. Ideally, Broadwell would've came out this year and I could say "wait six months for sky lake." However, AMD is basically frozen in place now. Carrizo was JUST formally announced days ago. Intel is giggling and just polishing up their 14nm process even more. Hopefully, skylake s will be out this time next year and you can build on that. But if you're QQing so much, then just go the peasant route and get some hot haswell action. It only came out 2013 and we're almost in 2015, so we won't make fun of you THAT much (I'm lying). EDIT Oh and your wording in the 4th choice makes it sound like you aren't up to date in the rumor mill (or perhaps I'm not). Broadwell will only be covering the "K" chips in 2015 (which are supposed to have bigger GPUs) while Skylake "S" (for "socketed", I think) will deal with the locked multiplier chips. So yeah, it's a bit fucked up. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a cost control measure because Skylake will have a boss GPU implementation would would make Skylake K too pricy for Intel compared to Broadwell.
If the next big jump is going to be Skylake, I don't think it'd be bad to invest in a shit-tier used laptop from ebay or something to last you for a year or so. Alternatively, buy a decent PC and sell it in a year for half what you paid, which might end up still only costing you similar to what a used laptop would have. From what Spartacus said above, Broadwell doesn't sound like something to wait for. I want to build a new PC next year but like Lazybum said, it's actually kind of difficult becuase I can't really find any situations in which my PC is lacking. The i5-2500k is such a mighty CPU that even though I want to change it, there's no reason to. I've had this windows install nearly 3 years now and that's pretty much unheard of for me, but it still feels as fast and problem-free as the day I got it from my friend. I honestly feel as if the step ups we're now getting from hardware upgrades are just getting less and less in terms of performance increase. No-one in the real world cares about efficiency, but that seems to be all the manufacturers are focusing on right now.
Another solution would be to troll overclocking forums for old CPUs. Literally any Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPU would do the job - even if it's had a tough life in the hands of an overclocker. Or if you're daring, take a G3258 and use that shiny cooler to get it up to ~4.5GHz or so. Cheap as fuck, but it'd run circles around your Q6600, as venerable as it once was.
I feel your pain. I'm still on a Q9550@3.4 from 2009, 8gig of DDR2, GF GTX 560 TI. I recently bought a used thinkpad x220T for more fun in the freetime at work. That 2011-ish i5-2520(m) in there is fast as hell compared to my Q9550. I want to upgrade from the Q9550, but nothing above the i7-2000 series seems really worth it. I actually want a rig that is not wasting 120 watts in idle, but all the boards for Haswell-E are wasting as much energy as my mobo from 2009 HALP! would it make any sense to stuff a GF GTX 970 in my Q9550 rig?
Nah, keep your 560 Ti or take something like a 750 Ti for $100 if you want to save (a lot) on power. A 970 would get bottlenecked hard. Unfortunately, there's nothing terribly appetizing between the 750 Ti and the 970 if efficiency is paramount.
I have an ultrabook with a HD4000, gaming on this thing is a joke and I doubt I can get something better for 100 €-quids. The Pentium G3258 is not enough for the newest games today so it's half-life is severly limited. http://www.pcper.com/news/Processor...ual-Core-Processors-Budget-Landscape-Shifting I see, it comes down to waiting for Broadwell. Am I supposed to live like a monk, read books and take long walks in the next three months? Is there any indication when desktop Broadwell will hit the store?
Get the best CPU you can afford whenever you upgrade, it is the most hassle. My 5yo Intel i7 is still overachieving and haven't even overclocked it.
You're probably not going to want desktop broadwell at all. It'll have a nice big GPU, but it won't be notably better than haswell in the same area. But skylake? That might be worth it. I don't really know much about skylake except it's due in 2015 for the multipler-locked desktop CPUs.
CPU: 4690k Cooler: Pre-owned Noctua Mobo: ASUS Z97 Pro GPU: ASUS / Gigabyte 970 (ASUS Strix for passive cooling and sexy design, Gigabyte for "factory superclocked".) RAM: HyperX Fury 1866Mhz 2x8GB in whatever colour PSU: Corsair RM550W (fully modular) Storage: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB + Western Digital Black 1TB Case: >going with anything that isn't the superior Corsair Carbide 540. Airflow to the max and a second chamber for the PSU and all the cables. Since there is no PCpartpicker specifically for Austria and the German version has 1% of the selection available, I can't set a specific price, but I assume around 1-1.2k€ depending on which stores you use. It's easy to cut back on a few things if you're on a budget too. Also, suggesting dual cores in 2014. lol Even overclocked, the G3258 struggles with some nasty stuttering. Every time I see people suggesting the G3258 "so you can upgrade to something like a 4690k later" I want to cry. Waste of money when you could save up a tad bit more and get the full package.
You have to recognize where he's coming from. He already has a decent cooler and a G3258 is definitely a performance upgrade for him. I think it'd be fun as hell to own a G3258 and I refuse to apologize for taking every opportunity to suggest one. They are just really cool.
Efficiency is important if the device in question is thin and/or uses a battery, which apply to many devices today. Even for other types of devices, manufacturers need to focus on perf/W, otherwise they will have chips with power consumption numbers in the kilowatts. Also, it's harder and harder to extract performance per core improvements in Intel's big cores because they are already very powerful and the low-hanging fruit has been taken care of a while ago. One reason why you still see large increases in the mobile space is that those cores haven't gotten to that point yet. Also some of the improvements in low-TDP Intel chips are actually due to large quantities of boost, which isn't as extensive elsewhere. As long as normal desktop chips stay at 4 GPU cores (which Broadwell and Skylake will, according to leaks) and given that clock speeds aren't really going above 4 GHz, architectural perf/W improvements lets them easily have sub-100 W TDPs, even with integrated GPUs. One big feature I'm aware of is AVX3 (Haswell has AVX2) which allows up to 2x the floating-point performance, but that probably won't affect consumer applications much. I don't remember seeing anything that points to Skylake having a considerable performance increase over Broadwell (or even Haswell) for desktops.
The main reason I want Broadwell over Haswell is that it is new and will cost the same, I don't really care about the 5% rumoured performance increase. I probably won't hold out until Skylake which is rumoured to be the next Sandy-Bridge like evolution. @Fooshi I only need CPU+motherboard+RAM, everything else in my PC was already updated over the last years. I would totally go for a 4690K if we had those fantastic deals over here. But look at this price development, the trend is actually going up instead of atleast slightly getting cheaper.
Forums are for mature people, my parents are active members of a motorcycle forum. If they can be adults and chill on forums, so can you.
For the first time on these forums, I actually went "what is that?" and realised ya'll were talking about something with lower specs than what I have. I feel like stroking my computer now. If only the graphics card fan didn't rattle like a jackhammer.
