Out of Pod Experience

Hi all :)

So I'm thinking of buying a new pc beings that the one I have is getting on for 3.5 years old now, something which i always do. Question is about processors. Would a Intel i7 quad core be sufficient for now and say a few yrs down the line? Or should I spend a bit more and go for the six core option?


I can either go with the...

intel® Core™ i7-2600 which is four core

or...

Intel® Core™ i7 3930K Six Core

I cannot decide.

That Intel 6-core is so expensive. But if you can afford , go with it.

8 cores of course...

I only got the 4 core. Honestly, 4 is minimum I'd say, more is useless for the next 2 years. When it comes to gaming anyway.

i7 is overkill, any of those or even i5 will last you for the next 2 years for anything and doing it great. Get cheap i7, in 2 years overclock it for another 2, or at least 1. Anything more is a waste of money.


If you want to invest money into something get solid state drives, I boot my windows 7 PC in less than 10 seconds, not kidding or exadurating, boot 10 sec max and no additional loading, just remember to use a seperate drive for all your games/media etc. So as to not waste your ssd. SSD bang for buck is the best enhancer in my book, to me it is cpu, ram, gpu, ssd. The 4 pillars.

Derp, and what if OP will listen your advice, and will buy cheap i5 , and is going to play Arma 3, with 500+ AI or some kind of Civilization 6 in huge map with many opponents? Or any other PC exclusive with lots of AI , huge amount of physics, whatever involved? There are games that dont give a damn about console performance, and many of them are great.

Also some people use multiple clients, vmware, dedicated servers, all this keeps sucking power.

It's easy to change video card, but changing CPU can be problematic, so better choose good one, unless you buy new PC every 2 years.

Buy the cheapest that will do the job.

Hey all, wow great discussion going on here. Many thx for the replies and maybe it will help someone else too.

Hmm, I've been reading up about Ivy Bridge, sounds cool and also ssd which I was unaware of .

Once again, many thx :o)

Do you want the new PC to be primarily for gaming or for actual work ?
Either way, there's only a very small selection of things (most of them NOT games) that are likely to benefit from an extremely beefy CPU, and there's an ever-expanding selection of things (more and more non-game things too) that are likely to benefit from a beefy GPU config.

I would say that for now, an i5-2500K should be more than sufficient for almost everything you could possibly need, doesn't break the bank and most importantly, doesn't have that stupid hyperthreading (the way the 2600K has; although I suppose you can turn it off on the 2600K, but why pay extra for something you most likely want to disable anyway).


On the other hand, there are only a handful of LGA1155 motherboards that support three PCI-E slots at more than x1 speed on each, and you want 3-way SLI/Crossfire for a "serious" gaming rig. This is one of the very few arguments in favour of going with a i7 3930K and a LGA2011 motherboard instead of just sticking with the much cheaper and almost as decent i5-2500K.
Why 3 PCI-E slots at high multiplier ?
Because 2-way Crossfire (AMD//ATI) suffers from serious micro-stutters, 2-way SLi (NVIDIA) slightly less bad but still noticeable, whereas this is NOT the case for any single card nor 3-way SLI/Crossfire configs (don't ask me why, it just is, tested practically by enough reviewers to be extremely likely to be true).
Of course, if you plan to go single video card, then you don't really care either way, so go with the 2500K.


On the gripping hand, in a few months both Intel and NVIDIA plan to come out with new stuff, which means the old stuff will become cheaper and the new stuff sold at the same price will have better performance and better power usage.
Intel - allegedly in early April - Ivy Bridge CPUs, a die shrink of Sandy Bridge on the CPU side (from 32nm to 22nm) with new tech (non-planar transistors) that should allow much lower power usage and lower price at the same performance (with higher performance levels available), also a slight architecture change on the integrated GPU side.
NVIDIA - unknown date, but probably before the summer, if not even before Intel - the Kepler // 600-series GeForce cards (28nm fab compared to the current 40nm one for the 500-series) ; it was delayed quite a bit (initially should have released in the autumn or at most winter of last year), but they should finally have it working properly ; same story - lower power usage and cheaper at same performance, higher performances available.
You might want to wait until then to buy a new machine. What's 3.8 years vs 3.5 years anyway ?

Oh, right now, HDDs are rather expensive too.
There's been some flooding in Taiwan at some HDD parts factories (WD was hit particularly hard IIRC), so the global price of HDDs has been spiking at the end of last year, and it's not looking like it's down enough just yet.
That's yet another good reason to wait a while longer... you could probably buy by late spring or early summer a faster 3TB HDD cheaper than a modest speed 2TB one right now.

Most video editing nowadays comes with some degree of video card hardware acceleration support.
Blender, I am quite certain it will be able to use whatever card you put in via OpenGL and a bit of configuration.
If you're using QuickSynch (or however else the Intel re-encoding hardware support is called for the SandyBridge CPUs) you can get even better performance than some high-end video cards (and getting support for that is a bit tricky).

You also will probably want oodles of RAM (I'd say 16GB just to be future-proof) and you should seriously consider a SSD.
For the SSD, either a medium-towards-large sized (120-128GB) one used as single OS + base apps partition (with the HDD as a separate second partition), or if you go with a Z68 motherboard, you could probably get away with SSD caching ("Smart Response Technology") of a regular HDD using a modest-sized (60-64GB) SSD, and in the long run, get performances close to (but not quite) the SSD level for most of your apps while paying a whole lot less overall.
Either way, the SSD has a very good chance to last long enough for you to want to buy a new machine anyway, the current generation of SSDs should have an average lifetime somewhere between 7 to 10 years. It should last longer if you use it as a separate partition, but you (arguably) get better overall performance with SSD caching.

...

That being said, the PSU also matters a lot, and you haven't listed any specs about it. Same story for specs on the RAM, motherboard, videocard (if any). And you have mentioned absolutely no prices.
Take a look at this thread in the old forum : http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1559734
Should have quite a bit of interesting info for you, mostly still valid.

If you're really into your Blender, you can go dual-cpu...12 cores would really make it fly.

The 2600 got updated with the 2700 btw, and DDR4 memory might come out this year, plus I'd go 24-32 GB with those apps.

23" ? ...24"+ for sure, with an IPS or PVA 'panel...you'd be happier with a 27" though, and try and get a 16:10 so you have got some room to work with...avoid TN panels like the plague