Worth upgrading my cpu?

MikeF

So i'm planning on doing a few upgrades to my system in the new year and i'm wondering if i can and should upgrade my cpu

i've got an msi-7681 board with Corei5 2500 cpu @ 3.3ghz (lga 1155). I beleive this is a second generation sandy bridge but i'm not 100% on that one.

First of all i'm wondering if my board is compatible with the newer generations of cpu's in the core series? (seem to be getting conflicting information on this one)

Second, would i see much of an improvement for cpu related tasks by moving up to a newer model i5?

I'm going to be putting most of my cash into a gpu upgrade but if i can get a bit more power on the cpu front i wouldn't mind putting some cash into that area as well

JedTheKrampus

If you upgrade to e.g. an i5-4670k you will see barely any performance increase (probably not more than 10% or so) unless you also overclock, and to do that on a Haswell chip you'll probably have to delid the CPU and reapply thermal paste to get good thermals, which definitely has the potential to go very wrong. If you really want to upgrade your CPU it would be better to get a real upgrade, like an i7-5820k with six cores and twelve threads, which will give you more than twice the speed for tasks like compiling and rendering. Any upgrade less than that is not really going to be worth it.

If you don't have an SSD I would recommend that upgrade rather than a CPU upgrade.

EarthQuake

You could get an i7 3770, which will be about 50% faster, but I'm not sure how smart that would be, with a new mobo, you could get a 5820k (which is twice as fast as Jed mentions) for perhaps not much more money than the 3770. Maybe you could find a cheap used 3770 on ebay or something.

My personal guideline is not to upgrade my cpu unless I can get something 2-3x as fast, which always means a new mobo and chipset.

+1 to getting a SSD if you don't have one already.

MikeF

Thanks for the help guys, i think i'll go the i7 route.
I've got an older low capacity SSD that i use for my OS and key applications but it might be worth upgrading there as well.

I see some pretty great deals on a couple 500gb drives but i'm a bit worried about the reliability since there seems to be a lot of off brand manufacturers out there, any suggestions for a good balance capacity/price/reliability?

EarthQuake

Samsung Evo line, can't go wrong.

grimsonfart

SSD all the way!

Eric Chadwick

Also have the Samsung EVO here, great upgrade.

My disk mirror wasn't flawless though, so beware. I have animation renders as thousands of sequential TIF files, and a few of those frames were corrupted somehow in the transition from HDD to SSD. Thankfully I had an offsite backup system (Crashplan) with multiple versions of each file, so I was able to quickly retrieve the uncorrupted versions. YMMV, but it pays to have good backups!

Chase

Check out the benchmark website for comparisons!