lardo5150

Well, the board in my signature rig decided to leave town.
I could just replace the board with another socket 775 board, but I think I will use this as an excuse with my wife to upgrade to the i7.

I am trying to get a basic idea of what it would cost me to build an i7 rig (cpu, board, ram).

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...238&CatId=4139

According to that deal, I can get the i7 and board for around 500 bucks. Does that seem about right?

I am also going to hold off till Black Friday to see if the deals are better.

Any input is appreciated, thanks.

nckid4u

About $525-600 for a solid i7/1156 setup

About $625-700 for a solid i7 1366 setup

That is Board, RAM, and CPU

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lardo5150

wow, looks like i am for sure waiting till Black Friday and selling my Q6700 and current ram.

Any real advantages/disadvantages with the two sockets?

nckid4u

The current 1156 setup runs the pci-e slots at 8x if you xfire or sli. 16x on single. You can get 1156 high end boards with the nf200 chip which will allow x16 on both slots. They run cooler, however, and are strong overclocker. There is also no stepping diffs on the 1156 i7s as of yet. Also only runs dual channel ram.
1366 runs trichannel ram, x16 on pci-e slots in xfire or sli. i9 is rumored to be on a 1366 platform.
Benchmarks, both synthetic and gaming show very little difference in these setups both in single card and multi-card solutions. The only place the 1366 seems to have a legitimate edge is in high end rendering proggies.

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lardo5150

Good info, thanks for posting.

Gives me some things to consider.

lardo5150

Quick question,
am I going to see a big increase in performance going from my sig rig to the i7 rig? (same video card though, just getting a board, ram, and cpu).

How about if I go to the i5????

nckid4u

You will certainly see a difference. The i5, i7 920, or i7 860 will all easily hit 4GHz. That alone will show a massive improvement over the 3 GHz Q6700 you have now.

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willis888

My experience of researching a i5 v i7 8x v i7 9x build led me to the conclusion that the top tier (i7 9x) is within $300 total system cost of either runner up and is the best option for a quad core machine.

It also led me to the conclusion that I should stick with my Core2Duo for gaming. Spending $1,300 on a new i7 920 does not make too much of a difference in Fallout 3, CoD 4, etc . . . I'd rather spend my gaming money on a second GPU, SSD to install to, a better case, RAID card, or other stuff that can move to the quad core build some day.

lardo5150

Are you saying that I should stick with my q6700?

willis888

I don't know your financial situation or how you use your computer(s).

I have a 3.0 GHz E8400 at home and built the i7 920 in my sig for my office. I was able to load it up with games in order to "test the stability" of the new machine.

The i7 is much nicer to use. Instant everything.

However, once the save file in your game of choice is finished loading, there is no appreciable difference.

The q6700 is not 45nm tech iirc? I don't know about replacing the board for a chip that old.

But you might not need to go all out on a quad-core - an e8xxx dual core is plenty fast for gaming.

If you do get a quad-core though, go all out on an i7 920.