For perhaps the first time, we are at a point where even enthusiast upgrades are driven less by pure performance and, in some cases at least, more by platform features, age, or simply needs for more systems. My last main system proc/board upgrade, a Q6600 at 3.6GHz to an i7-930 at 4GHz, was largely platform driven. I needed more PCIe slots and lanes than my P35 offered me. My HTPC upgrade (C2D at 3.4GHz to i5-2500K at 4.5GHz) had no need it all--I wanted to play with the new Sandy Bridge platform. My last server upgrade, a Q6600 at 3.0GHz to an AMD PII X4 at 3.6GHz, was because I needed to install more than 8G of memory. The NAS upgrade, from an old school socket 939 X2 4400+ to Athlon II X2 at 3.1GHz, was because the old NF4 platform was poorly supported under Server 2008 R2. It's more and more rare that I perform an upgrade because of running into performance walls.
The great thing about most of these upgrades is that it's allowed replacement of even older, less used or important systems. I'm at a point now that every system is at least a dual core, with most of them quads, with 4G of memory--meaning that even trickle down upgrades are mostly unnecessary. It's an interesting time in enthusiast computing, I think. For the record, the i7 is definitely much faster across the board--virtualization, compression, and encoding performance are all greatly improved. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Joshua MacCraw > Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 6:54 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [H] upgrades > > Same case here with a Q6600 I think my money would be better spent on an > upgrade of my 3870x2 video card than a new system. > > That said if I had a windfall of cash I'd build a whole new system rather than > retro the old because it is still way viable even for gaming. With 2 kids sharing > a single dell D8400 that would be a nice downstream. ;) On Apr 2, 2011 11:40 > AM, "Brian Weeden" <[email protected]> wrote:
