920 upgrade!

B

Bootes

n00b
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Jul 28, 2012
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Hi everyone I'm new here, I post over on EOCF, and others I've got a few questions. I'm looking to upgrade my i7 920.

Would just upgrading the cpu be better to say, a 970? or going for a newer 3770k or something? I don't do much but game, Office type work and Photoshop/lightroom. Looking forward to your thoughts of what you guys would be a better choice,

*Just a note the 3770k isn't the proc of choice, just that socket (1155?) Correct me if I'm wrong, Thanks.
 
Have you tried overclocking your i7 920?

A new videocard / SSD drive would be better than upgrading to the current CPU's out now if you overclock your 920 a bit.
 
Its been at 4.0 for a while, I forgot to mention that.. Sorry.... Im also running at GTX 580, and a SSD.... So spec wise, the only thing lacking is the CPU...
 
Here the though of someone who has upgraded from i7 950 to a 3770K.

IMO, the best choice would be to keep your money and wait for Haswell as the performance gain does not worth it.
If you have money to spend, I suggest considering buying a second video card for SLI (or get a 680) or maybe even getting a bigger monitor.
 
RadXge said:
Here the though of someone who has upgraded from i7 950 to a 3770K.

IMO, the best choice would be to keep your money and wait for Haswell as the performance gain does not worth it.
If you have money to spend, I suggest considering buying a second video card for SLI (or get a 680) or maybe even getting a bigger monitor.
Click to expand...

Alright, I like the input, thanks for that heads up! I was curious about how big of a performance jump it would really be... Whats the expected performance increase with Haswell going to be looking like? Anywhere you can direct me to some predictions on it? Unless of course they haven't gotten that far into leaking the information yet..
 
Clock for clock, the 3770K would be about 30% faster than your 920. If that kind of gain seems worth it to you, then go for it. If not, then I agree to wait for Haswell.

Welcome to the [H]orde!
 
As said, even though the 920 an "older" model CPU, it's still a solid performer and more than adequate for what you're doing.
 
If you have the upgrade itch you could always sell the 580 and go for the 680, otherwise your set. What's you monitor resolution BTW?
 
I've heard from several people who have upgraded from a 7xx process to one of the newer 3xxx models, and they all have considered it wasting money as they have seen minimal improvements, if any. If you really wanna upgrade I say go for the 790
 
DejaWiz said:
Clock for clock, the 3770K would be about 30% faster than your 920. If that kind of gain seems worth it to you, then go for it. If not, then I agree to wait for Haswell.

Welcome to the [H]orde!
Click to expand...

More like 15% (Nehalem->SB was 10%, SB->IB was 5%).
Basically, not a noticeable upgrade if you're on a motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. The only reason to move up to an Ivy Bridge rig is if you want the new features.
Even on an i7 920, you're going to be GPU-bottlenecked in nearly all games.
 
Relativist said:
If you have the upgrade itch you could always sell the 580 and go for the 680, otherwise your set. What's you monitor resolution BTW?
Click to expand...

DejaWiz said:
Clock for clock, the 3770K would be about 30% faster than your 920. If that kind of gain seems worth it to you, then go for it. If not, then I agree to wait for Haswell.

Welcome to the [H]orde!
Click to expand...

bwang said:
More like 15% (Nehalem->SB was 10%, SB->IB was 5%).
Basically, not a noticeable upgrade if you're on a motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. The only reason to move up to an Ivy Bridge rig is if you want the new features.
Even on an i7 920, you're going to be GPU-bottlenecked in nearly all games.
Click to expand...

Relativist: I'm on a Samsung 226BW 22" Old. but I love it. I don't mind using a 22" to me anything bigger, is a bit much... Too much.

DejaWiz: Thanks for the welcome, I'm seeing that waiting for Haswell will be worth my wait and ill just stick my 920 out till the end!

bwang: Thanks for that info update, I've been kind of in the dark with all of Intel new products after SB-E came out i just stopped paying a lot of attention to their line up.
 
bwang said:
More like 15% (Nehalem->SB was 10%, SB->IB was 5%).
Basically, not a noticeable upgrade if you're on a motherboard with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. The only reason to move up to an Ivy Bridge rig is if you want the new features.
Even on an i7 920, you're going to be GPU-bottlenecked in nearly all games.
Click to expand...

No, it's about 30% median in productivity based applications and...benchmarks. Head over to Anand's CPU comparison tool and see.
 
DrDoU said:
That i7 920 has plenty of gas left to run programs and games.
Click to expand...

Thats what everyone else is saying, and with more people adding to that list... I'll stick to the 920 for now. Haswell will be the next big upgrade for me then!
 
Glad to see this thread, as I had been contemplating upgrading my i7 920 as well. Sounds like it's not really worth it, though.

How far out is Haswell?
 
My normal 3770 decodes about 40% faster then my 920 does. Heres the FPS I get while decoding through Handbrake and the particular settings I use.

Bluray
3770: 19 FPS
920: 12 FPS

DVD
3770: 100 FPS
920: 60 FPS

So for that the 3770 makes a very noticable and consistamt difference, but outside of that I didn't "notice" much difference in just general usage. And thats *not* using the Quicksync feature of Ivy Bridge. With Quicksync you get that performance and use almost no CPU usage, but the quality of Quicksync encoders is still a little iffy so I don't use it.
 
A lot of the performance improvement in encoding/decoding due to AVX I bet...on apps that can use it, AVX is absurdly fast (Linpack shows a 100% improvement over Nehalem/Westmere).
 
DejaWiz said:
Clock for clock, the 3770K would be about 30% faster than your 920. If that kind of gain seems worth it to you, then go for it. If not, then I agree to wait for Haswell.

Welcome to the [H]orde!
Click to expand...

Patently false. You can expect at most 15% IPC under ideal conditions. Wait for Haswell unless you're really desperate to reduce power consumption.
 
Bootes said:
Alright, I like the input, thanks for that heads up! I was curious about how big of a performance jump it would really be... Whats the expected performance increase with Haswell going to be looking like? Anywhere you can direct me to some predictions on it? Unless of course they haven't gotten that far into leaking the information yet..
Click to expand...

That'll depend on your programs. Haswell is looking to be yet another GPU-focused microarchitecture but it'll sport AVX2. So if your programs are recompiled to take advantage of the ISA you might see an okay benefit, but I still wouldn't expect anything significant.
 
I was able to sell my i7 920 rig on C-list for a good price, so for me, it was worth the upgrade to a 2600K. I have my SB CPU at 4.4Ghz easy vs. 4GHz with the 920. And the temperatures are so much lower. My four cores are running at 32-35C right now, vs. 44-48C with my 920, and that was with a lapped heat sink which performed a lot better than when it wasn't lapped. And my P67 mobo has Sata 3.0, and my Gigabyte EX58-UD5 was only 2.0. And I can run all my fans much slower, so my rig is more quiet.

If you can sell your current gear for a decent price and have the money to upgrade, it is worth it IMO. But if money isn't easy to come by at this time, or you don't want to go through the hassle of upgrading, etc., your 920 is still a fantastic chip.
 
wabbitseason said:
Patently false. You can expect at most 15% IPC under ideal conditions. Wait for Haswell unless you're really desperate to reduce power consumption.
Click to expand...

Shoot, I was comparing stock clock to stock clock performance, not clock for clock...which is why I saw about 30% median in the comparison results. Sorry OP!

Totally my bad.
 
I had an i7 920 for many years that ran 24/7 at 3.8. I grabbed a 2500k not expecting much other than something new to play with. However, I was pleasantly surprised to notice performance increases in games even at stock speeds. The avg frames stayed pretty steady but those "hiccups" that you get every so often sharply decreased in number of occurrences at the same settings.

It's become an unfortunate hardware enthusiast standard to focus on the average and ignore the precision. You won't really see a change in average performance, but you'll definitely see a difference in precision.. I would definitely recommend a 2500k or 3570k. I think you'd be very happy.
 
ahh! Mixed reviews now! haha its rough to see if its really worth it, like now im put at a cross road... >_<
 
I say stick with the Core i7 920. For a 4 year old processor it still is kicking butt. some games you have to turn a few settings down to run at 1920x1200 but i suspect that has more to do with my 6950 2gb and less about the processor.

just wish it had Sata 6 GB/s for my SSD and USB 3.0.. so annoying to bend over my computer to plug stuff in.. oh well 1st world problems haha
 
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