Sandy bridge quad -> Ivy bridge quad -> Haswell quad..... is it worth upgarding?

[Kippa]

Is it really worth upgrading going from the different architectures with regards to quad core cpus? Say going from an Sandybridge Quad core to upgrade to a Haswell Quad core? Are the improvements really that worth it?

I'm not talking about benchmarks et al, what I am talking about is how you generally feel about upgrading to a new system. If you had a sandybridge quad, would you realistically upgrade to an Ivybridge quad system or even Haswell Quad core system?

I've got an aging i7 970 six core cpu and my games play fine on that cpu, even BF4. I look at all these different iterations of quad cores on newer architectures and get the general feeling that it isn't worth upgrading, not yet anyway, not at the moment. I used to like upgrading to a new rig and when I got a new one every few years you could feel the extra power of the new rig compared to the old one. These days the cpu seems to be an iteration of the same product with a small perceivable power upgrade.

Like I said the focus of the thread isn't primarily focusing on benchmarks, but how you "feel". Are things going to stay the same with small performance increases, year after year, or do you think things will pick up and we will start to see bigger changes in the newer upcoming cpus?

 

[NTMBK]

Nah. If you're on a Core 2 Quad or a Phenom II *looks at own PC sadly* then think about it, otherwise don't even bother.

 

[gammaray]

always depends if you have a buyer for your old computer or if you are a pc enthusiast. I upgraded my 2500k to a 3570k to a 4670, i had fun building my pcs and got good price for old ones. So i'd say it was totally worth it.

 

[AtenRa]

Wait for Haswell-E next year.

 

[BrightCandle]

Nothing about Broadwell or Haswell-E suggests anything but small increments in performance and maybe a little extra clock speed. Architectural improvements bringing 0-20% or so extra performance seem to be the new normal in growth which means its only really worth upgrading after about 5 years or so once you can get 1.5x extra performance (noticeable). You are about at the right point to get something that in practice will feel faster but you'll want to wait for Haswell-E and get a 6 core or there isn't much benefit for you.

 

[Hulk]

I would consider upgrading from Sandy to Ivy if your motherboard supports it because that's a simple drop in and be done with it upgrade. But only if you are moving from non HT Sandy to HT Ivy. And even then only if the apps you regularly use will benefit from HT.

I wouldn't upgrade from Ivy to Haswell. Too little performance improvement to have to get a new motherboard and reload everything.

I recently got in on the Microcenter $200 4770k deal so I went from 2500k to 4770k and I only notice a difference when encoding video. Was it worth it? From a strict dollars and sense point of view probably not but I'm an enthusiast so it's not entirely about dollars and sense to me. It's also just fun to have the latest and greatest.

As for bigger performance increases in the future, I wouldn't get your hopes up. There is only so much instruction level parallelism that can be extracted from software and much of it has been squeezed out already. I don't think we'll see much of a frequency improvement so we're probably looking at more minor IPC increases and hex cores becoming the "new" quad on the desktop. If we're really lucky we'll skip hexes and see quads replace duals and eight core parts replace quads. And then we have to hope that software designers can make use of all of those cores.

 

[BSim500]

Is it really worth upgrading going from the different architectures with regards to quad core cpus? Say going from an Sandybridge Quad core to upgrade to a Haswell Quad core? Are the improvements really that worth it?

I'm not talking about benchmarks et al, what I am talking about is how you generally feel about upgrading to a new system.

Depends. I think Sandy -> Ivy is worth it because speed aside, it reuses the same socket (often no new motherboard needed) and also achieves quite a drop in power consumption (due to moving to 22nm process). I won't be upgrading from an i5-3570 to a Haswell though. In fact the non-K Haswell chips are actually a downgrade due to Intel's removal of the +4-bins limited OC (meaning non-K Haswell's run roughly 400Mhz slower than non-K Ivy Bridge, eg, 4670's max Turbo is 3.8Ghz vs 3570's 4.2GHz on a Z motherboard for non-K chips).

As for general subjective "feeling" vs objective benchmark, most people struggle to subjectively notice anything less than a 20-30% improvement outside of benchmarks. I make it my "policy" not to bother even looking at an expensive upgrade that gives less than 30% real-world improvement. My last chip was an i3-530, so that 30-40% per-core IPC improvement (and +100% boost overall for 4-thread loads) was definitely noticeable especially when video encoding and smoother in some quad-core games. But if I had an existing i5-2500K or newer, it would have been a less clear-cut choice. Given Intel's measly +10% IPC per generation, I can see my current chip lasting me at least 3 maybe 4 generations. And if Intel tails off the frequency of generations from 1 per year to 1 per 18-24months, I can see it lasting a good 4-6 years.

GFX cards & SSD's make far more of a difference these days in terms of "feeling" fast in games / general usage responsiveness.

 

[Charlie98]

I keep wanting to 'new and improve' my 2500K/Z68 combo, but I know it's not worth it. I would really like to upgrade the Mobo to Z77 to get native USB3.0 support, that would buy me some time and actually provide me with a tangible benefit to justify spending money on an obsolete platform....

 

[Makaveli]

Good thread and i'm on the same chip and same problem.

I'm really looking to see what haswell E has to offer. The platform however is a big deal for me and I don't think we will see SATA express on Haswell E it might be on the refresh after that.

I am not impressed with x79 at all interms of what it offers.

And while the IPC jump from Gulftown to Haswell will be fairly large when it comes to multithreaded work loads the extra cores on the 970 closes the gap or provides slight lead over haswell.

For the feel of the machine I didn't notice much of a difference using my machine and a friends overclocked 4770k.

There were some differences in CPU bottlenecked games but not enough to warrant a full platform upgrade. Example SC2 which is only capped with two 2 threads. Games like BF3 that uses more cores I didn't see a huge difference in frame rates with the Same GPU.

So its not an easy choice.

 

[Piroko]

I'm still on a Phenom2 and one of the main reasons for me to upgrade are the big three (USB3, SATA3, PCIE3).
If you already have those and only upgrade for that little extra in performance, then more power to you, but I wouldn't say it's money well spent unless you step up in the performance bracket as well.

 

[steve wilson]

I'm still on a 2500k, with no plans to upgrade because as others have said already, there just seems like very little gain for a lot of money. I have recently upgraded my gfx card and I think I will probably do another gfx card upgrade before I do a CPU upgrade in 2+ years time.

 

[Bman123]

That i7 970 is a beastly chip, no need to upgrade anytime soon. I wish I would of bought one when they released because they were definitely worth it. If only I would of known that it would of turned out this way with ivy and has well I could of skipped console gaming all together and been way better off

 

[mindbomb]

if you are using integrated graphics, each one is a pretty big improvement.

but other than that, the only big difference imo is that haswell supports avx2, which can potentially give you big performance increases over ivybridge and sandybridge.

 

[desiplaya4life]

I am glad I am out of building PC era .. when I was younger I use to love wasting money on frivolous upgrades and race with "benchmarks" when in real life.. i only accounted for maybe 20% of its raw power..?

I am just going to be happy with a console now a days and release my gaming urge and spend rest of my free time in more productiveness :_)

 

[blastingcap]

From a sheer performance perspective it is not worth it

 

[FordGT]

At normal prices, I would never think about upgrading to a 4770K from a 2700K but would it be worth it for those of us who can take advantage of Intel's Retail Edge program? I'm not really sure it is.

The 4770K is $79 but a decent LGA1150 motherboard is around $130-$150 and the minuscule performance increase doesn't seem worth the $300. Less overclocking room than Sandy Bridge and Haswell is known to be a scorcher. You also have to consider the fact that the current 8 series chipsets will probably not be compatible with Broadwell chips even if they use socket LGA1150.

 

[krumme]

In a desktop and not for fun? Clearly not. I bought an haswell quad for myself to replace the ib but ended installing it in one of the kids desktops. It was simply not worth unscreewing the old mb and mess with a new cooler setup to save 7w idling. Sb to hw is same on desktop, its on the notebooks there is difference and for good reason. Hw is a darn good product for battery life.

I think its better to think of haswell as a mobile processor put in a desktop box.

There is no such thing as desktop Haswell. Its just a name without substance.

 

[skipsneeky2]

God it seems like i won't be ever upgrading this processor, the thought of a overclocking Haswell setup has crossed my mind but seems almost wasteful for the few games i am cpu limited in....Broadwell lga or whatever comes out next year or 2015 on the desktop seems like the most logical choice.

These Sandy bridge chips have a ton of staying power, good thing i guess but damn most people might be better off making their video cards the bottleneck again by going with a 1440/1600p panel lol. I know i will be next year.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I am glad I am out of building PC era .. when I was younger I use to love wasting money on frivolous upgrades and race with "benchmarks" when in real life.. i only accounted for maybe 20% of its raw power..?

I am just going to be happy with a console now a days and release my gaming urge and spend rest of my free time in more productiveness :_)

I'm looking at next-gen consoles too, I'm so sick of spending $$$ on upgrading PCs these days only to see unoptimized console port turds dumped on my face.

 

[Makaveli]

I am glad I am out of building PC era .. when I was younger I use to love wasting money on frivolous upgrades and race with "benchmarks" when in real life.. i only accounted for maybe 20% of its raw power..?

I am just going to be happy with a console now a days and release my gaming urge and spend rest of my free time in more productiveness :_)

I enjoy this hobby too much to just quit the game.

I just upgrade smarter now that i'm older.

So my current rig will almost see 5 years of service before a major overhaul which would have never happened in the past.

 

[krumme]

God it seems like i won't be ever upgrading this processor, the thought of a overclocking Haswell setup has crossed my mind but seems almost wasteful for the few games i am cpu limited in....Broadwell lga or whatever comes out next year or 2015 on the desktop seems like the most logical choice.

These Sandy bridge chips have a ton of staying power, good thing i guess but damn most people might be better off making their video cards the bottleneck again by going with a 1440/1600p panel lol. I know i will be next year.

I think there is more perspective in choosing an amd cgn card for gaming. The reason is with mantle in the games eg bf4 mantle will remove a lot of the bottleneck of the cpu. Look at the consoles. In the intense scenes playing with a lot of elements mantle can really raise the min fps. The potential for certain situations could easily be 100% even if it on average is only say 15% faster. So if gaming is the main reason for upgrade, mantle is the way to go to get more cpu power.

Look at what a jaguar 1.6ghz can do in a ps4! Now imagine you use an sb instead. Lol. That is a difference worth getting.

 

[piasabird]

I have one computer that is still a 775 socket E7200. Still runs great. However, I don't play many computer games on it. Still Streams Video just fine. My other computer is a 2500K with no video card I use primarily for watching videos on my HDTV.

 

[steve wilson]

I enjoy this hobby too much to just quit the game.

I just upgrade smarter now that i'm older.

So my current rig will almost see 5 years of service before a major overhaul which would have never happened in the past.

Yeah I do the same. It's good really...saves me a lot of money compared to upgrading every 2-3 years.

 

[sm625]

The move from core to nehalem was a huge one, because it dramatically reduced memory latency, context switching, and intra-core communications. These changes really make windows and multitasking feel much faster. This benefit is in many ways intangible", you cant see it just by looking at benchmarks, except in maybe some games. The move from nehalem to sandy really only gets you more speed. The move to ivy really only gets you more energy savings. It doesnt get you anything "intangible", ie anything that you cant see in the benchmarks. Same goes for haswell. This opinion will change if someone releases a killer ap that makes revolutionary use of vector processing ...

 

[ElFenix]

The move from core to nehalem was a huge one, because it dramatically reduced memory latency, context switching, and intra-core communications. These changes really make windows and multitasking feel much faster. This benefit is in many ways intangible", you cant see it just by looking at benchmarks, except in maybe some games. The move from nehalem to sandy really only gets you more speed. The move to ivy really only gets you more energy savings. It doesnt get you anything "intangible", ie anything that you cant see in the benchmarks. Same goes for haswell. This opinion will change if someone releases a killer ap that makes revolutionary use of vector processing ...

i didn't feel any different bouncing around in windows going from c2q to ivy.

:shrug:

for the OP, i'd go SSD or new video card before upgrading a sandybridge quad at this point. unless you are a heavy video encoder; haswell is a ton faster at that.