Time for a CPU upgrade?

M

Miseryguts

Member
My rig hasn't seen any upgrades for quite a while & I'm wondering if now is the time particularly in light of upcoming games such as Elite Dangerous, Witcher 3 etc.

I've been told that options for upgrades are limited with my mobo (particularly the CPU) is that correct? & if there are any worthy contenders can people suggest a few.

Money is an object atm so price is a major factor

Any advice/other upgrade suggestions would be greatly appreciated.. thanks for listening

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
i7 920 DO @3.8Ghz
6GB DDR3
GTX 670 Windforce 3x
 
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Yeah the 920 is an old chip and the 1366 socket isn't used anymore. So you'll need to get a new mobo that is either socket 1155 (Intel) or FM2/FM2+ (AMD).
 
voyagerfan99 said:
Yeah the 920 is an old chip and the 1366 socket isn't used anymore. So you'll need to get a new mobo that is either socket 1155 (Intel) or FM2/FM2+ (AMD).
Click to expand...

Kinda suspected as much.. gonna have to make do with what I've got for a lot longer, as I can't afford to start from scratch in the foreseeable future.. cheers for the reply.
 
You can still buy the 970, 980, 980X which will all be upgrades, from Amazon, however they're expensive and probably not worth it.
 
Dude seriously, you don't need to upgrade anything and if you did upgrade something, it would be the graphics card. I upgraded from a Q9550 with a 680 to a 3770k with the same 680 and got basically no improvement in graphics, really wasn't worth the money. The only improvements would be in cpu demanding games and there are only very few games like this and I don't think theres a game out there yet that your CPU cant handle. My Q9550 was able to push my 680 GTX to 100% in every game I played, Ok it was overclocked to 3.8GHhz, but GTA4 was the only game I found that my Q9550 could not max out my 680, which my 3770k can.
Your 920 can handle a lot more than a 670 for sure and you would get a much bigger boost in performance by upgrading your graphics card. Download some monitoring software and see for yourself how your CPU and graphics card are performing. I usually found my Q9550 was at 70-80% when my 680 was at 100%, so there was still some head room.
 
Many thanks for the feedback guys.. & Shlouski if I was to go for a GPU upgrade can you suggest a few worth considering, most bang for buck/overclockability(?) etc desktop res is 1920x1200.

Cheers.

EDIT:

Forget to ask if going from 6 to 8GB of ram (or more) would make a noticeable difference.. rig is used primarily for gaming & would I struggle finding compatible, considering the age of my mobo?
 
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I personally don't really consider overclocking as much when it comes to choosing a graphics cards. You can usually only overclock a bit as most of the time they are pretty much pushed as far as they will go out of the factory. Of course there are some exceptions, but the performance gains are not like those you can get out a cpu.
Depending where you live and what your budget is, will greatly influence what graphics card you can get.
My advice would be to go to sites like tomshardware on one page and open another with all the places you can buy from, for example ebay. This way to can figure out which has the best performance in your price range.
Many people also take into consideration what games they will be playing, as some games often work better on AMD or NVIDIA cards.
If your computer is not using all of if ram when gaming, then adding more will not increase performance and the reason for me personally having so much ram is that I like to use a ramdisk.
Hope this helps.
 
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