What is my upgrade path? i7 3970x -> What?

Hybris · Jun 6, 2016

I guess like a lot of people now I'm looking at potential upgrades for my rig however its seems that most people are running mid range i5's, the odd 5XXX series i7 chips and generally stuff that's only a two years old give or take.

Overall from that jumping off point the performance gains of the Broadwell-E chips doesn't justify the cost of the chips nor the new hardware needed.

However I'm running a much older 4 year old i7 3970x (6 core 3.5 GHz stock 24/7 OC'ed to 4.0 Ghz) a chip that most people never seem to recognize that even existed given how little I've ever seen it mentioned anywhere.

Now I'm at least a year away from my original planned upgrade date (I build for a 5-7 years lifespan) so I'm not on a hair trigger by any means but besides more PCIe lanes and 3.0 lanes at that, M.2 support, USB 3.0c/3.1 support, and DDR4 I'm not seeing much else in terms of raw power either now or in the pipeline that would make even as big of a jump of processor generations as mine worth it.

I spent the money on the Messiah chip and it in all honesty still works just fine save for a motherboard that refuses to allow itself to be updated or use any of the ASUS software, but of course I have that itch we all have for more power and I could easily retire this rig to a much needed media center/server/storage role.

I realize I'm rambling but my overall question still stands... Where can I go from here and not find myself in the same trap as so many Ivy Bridge and newer people seem to have found themselves in after Sandy Bridge-E from what I could tell set the high water mark for several generations?

steftralala · Jun 6, 2016

running a 3930k here 24/7 @ 4.8 ghz. I dont feel this CPU is past it's time yet. Its not bottlenecking my GPU or anything for that matter. I say keep that chip for a while and maybe invest in cooling solutions to crank up the speed.... 4,0 ghz on that chip is like driving 60 km/h in a ferrari

aDyerSituation · Jun 6, 2016

My advice is to just keep rocking what you got. You could easily push the OC on your chip more too. Maybe zen will bring something maybe not. I'd buy more storage/better graphics card/equipment before anything else.

Mhill2029 · Jun 6, 2016

I went from X79 3930K @4.5Ghz to X99 5960X @ 4.5Ghz and I can tell you it wasn't worth it. I notice no difference between the systems to be honest...only difference I saw was the jump from 3x EVGA 780TI SC to 4x EVGA Titan X SC's. GPU's and SSD's show the best improvement for the desktop, CPU's do nothing.

Unless your a die hard video encoder then upgrading to Broadwell-E would be the only reason it could be justified. For gaming it's money down the drain since it'll gain you absolutely nothing at all. Christ even I've been eyeing up the 6950X just recently, thinking of picking one up for giggles.

At the end of the day and my experience with the top of the range systems it's just not worth the expense. My X79 rig blitzes through everything even today with no sign of being hampered for the foreseeable future.

Trouble with being an enthusiast you buy stupid stuff just because you want it, not because you actually need it. I've since sold off 2x Titan X's and my 3rd ROG Swift and I've got a much better system than I had before. Go figure....

TrueForm · Jun 6, 2016

Upgrade the GPU. CPU is fine.

Hybris · Jun 6, 2016

Quote:

Originally Posted by steftralala

running a 3930k here 24/7 @ 4.8 ghz. I dont feel this CPU is past it's time yet. Its not bottlenecking my GPU or anything for that matter. I say keep that chip for a while and maybe invest in cooling solutions to crank up the speed.... 4,0 ghz on that chip is like driving 60 km/h in a ferrari

I really want to jump to 4.5 and have done it before but just using the auto voltage settings its hitting 1.44-1.45v which from what I've read tends to quickly kill these chips. If I could figure out how to use the voltage options in my BIOS to set a max limit of Intel's max voltage spec of 1.35v I feel confident that I can run 24/7 with no issues.

Hybris · Jun 6, 2016

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mhill2029

I went from X79 3930K @4.5Ghz to X99 5960X @ 4.5Ghz and I can tell you it wasn't worth it. I notice no difference between the systems to be honest...only difference I saw was the jump from 3x EVGA 780TI SC to 4x EVGA Titan X SC's. GPU's and SSD's show the best improvement for the desktop, CPU's do nothing.

Unless your a die hard video encoder then upgrading to Broadwell-E would be the only reason it could be justified. For gaming it's money down the drain since it'll gain you absolutely nothing at all. Christ even I've been eyeing up the 6950X just recently, thinking of picking one up for giggles.

At the end of the day and my experience with the top of the range systems it's just not worth the expense. My X79 rig blitzes through everything even today with no sign of being hampered for the foreseeable future.

Trouble with being an enthusiast you buy stupid stuff just because you want it, not because you actually need it. I've since sold off 2x Titan X's and my 3rd ROG Swift and I've got a much better system than I had before. Go figure....

Pretty much this was the argument that people made way back when I built this system that the power was useless and yet here I am still running with little effort save for GPU limits and even then my 6gb 1ghz edition HD7970 is barely beaten by anything short of the new 1080 and nothing yet from AMD.

aDyerSituation · Jun 6, 2016

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hybris

Pretty much this was the argument that people made way back when I built this system that the power was useless and yet here I am still running with little effort save for GPU limits and even then my 6gb 1ghz edition HD7970 is barely beaten by anything short of the new 1080 and nothing yet from AMD.

7970 has lived a great life thus far. The 390x/290x is still quite a bit faster. The 480 would be a good upgrade for you in my opinion.

Ripple · Jun 7, 2016

I am in the same boat with a 3960x and like you, have very little reason to upgrade at the moment. I was not thrilled with the X99 chipset so I am skipping this round including Broadwell-E. I am looking forward to Skylake-E which I think will be a better upgrade based on the success of the 6700K. Would m.2 support and even PCI-E 3.0 be nice? Yes, but I can wait.

Don't worry about those voltages. I have overclocked mine to 4.8GHz, stable. I think I have a good chip, max 1.38v. Anything at or above 1.5v and your chip will degrade.

JackCY · Jun 7, 2016

Intel has made little to no progress and is essentially releasing each year a 5% better performance which means you have to wait several releases of the platform to even get any worthwhile possible upgrade. Say Sandy/Ivy desktop would upgrade now to Skylake. Problem is the E series has fewer and later updates I'm not sure it's worth it to get the Broadwell E as the whole BW series is a poor clocker even these newer E series...
On the other hand you could get a BW Xeon with more cores than the consumer i7s have for same $.

I don't know why an old Sandy would have a problem with 1.4V when smaller newer node Haswell can do it and some poeple run that. I believe 1.35-1.45V on Sandy was quite normal for OC voltage.

PontiacGTX · Jun 7, 2016

Wait for Skylake-E (or AMD zen) and pgrade the gpu
Quote:

Originally Posted by Hybris

Pretty much this was the argument that people made way back when I built this system that the power was useless and yet here I am still running with little effort save for GPU limits and even then my 6gb 1ghz edition HD7970 is barely beaten by anything short of the new 1080 and nothing yet from AMD.

a 7970 was hard to beat in 2012 but r9 290/x /390/x are already 25-40% better so new cards so either a RX 480 is almost 40-50 faster at 200usd

neurotix · Jun 7, 2016

The i7 3970X is still a very fast, modern processor. However, it's also 4 generations old on a core basis. Since your Sandy Bridge, there has been Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, and now Skylake, though Kaby Lake is supposed to hit by the end of the year. Technically, even my Haswell will be 3 generations old soon.

If you went from your 3970X to a 6700k, you would see single threaded performance improve somewhere on the order of 20% (minimum). In some areas and games the increase could be much more. And from a pure gaming standpoint, you also don't need those 2 extra cores/4 extra threads. Single thread is still king and very few games use more than 4 threads. On top of this, you would have newer features of the Z170 chipset and DDR4. There's an article/news post around here somewhere showing a big increase in FPS going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-3200, some games gained up to 20 fps just from the RAM speed.

Is it necessary? No. But going to Skylake would still be a significant improvement depending on the games you play. Evaluate what games you are playing and whether or not you are happy with your fps, and look up benchmarks of those games on different generations of processors to see if the switch is worth it for you or not.

On to the 7970. I ran one for a year in 2013. They are great GPUs, but unfortunately you are a little bit wrong in your evaluation. Even one of my 380X is 15-20% faster than a 7970 (17.2% faster in 3dmark Fire Strike with both cards doing 1200mhz on air, according to the benches on my HWBOT profile.) The 7970 and 380X actually have the exact same specs but the 380X is GCN 1.2 and has faster per shader performance as well as delta color compression. I also used to have 2x 290s in Crossfire and I know without a doubt, the 290 is significantly faster. Not only that but it has double the ROPs and more texture units in addition to more shaders. The Fire Strike difference was 33.9% between my 7970 and my single 290.

On top of that, there are cards like the Fury/Fury X. The Fury X in particular has literally twice the specs of the 7970: 4096 SP, 64 ROPs, 256 TMUs. (7970 is 2048 shaders, 32 ROPs, 128 TMUs).

That's not even considering Nvidia, I will be fair and say that the 980 is around 20% faster on average than the 290/390/X, the 980ti is probably 20% faster than that, and the 1080 is at least 30% faster than the 980ti according to most reports.

So where's that leave your 7970? The first thing in the system to upgrade imo. Going with at least a Fury X or possibly a 1080 you may very well get a card that is twice as fast. This makes sense; the 7970 launched on Dec. 22nd, 2011. It's over 4 years old at this point. If it still works well for you, that's great; but if it were me, I would upgrade. $300 should get you something considerably faster.

Anyway sorry this was so long. I hope I helped, I tried to give what I thought was perspective that other posters are missing. Regards.

EDIT: JackCY: I ran 1.47v through a 4770k for over 2 years because I had a dog of a chip and that's what it took to do just 4.5ghz. It still worked when I sold it and I've had no complaints from the guy who bought it.

Kana Chan · Jun 7, 2016

4960X or E5-1680 V2 are possible upgrade paths for the i7-3970X

Hybris · Jun 7, 2016

Quote:

Originally Posted by neurotix

The i7 3970X is still a very fast, modern processor. However, it's also 4 generations old on a core basis. Since your Sandy Bridge, there has been Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, and now Skylake, though Kaby Lake is supposed to hit by the end of the year. Technically, even my Haswell will be 3 generations old soon.

If you went from your 3970X to a 6700k, you would see single threaded performance improve somewhere on the order of 20% (minimum). In some areas and games the increase could be much more. And from a pure gaming standpoint, you also don't need those 2 extra cores/4 extra threads. Single thread is still king and very few games use more than 4 threads. On top of this, you would have newer features of the Z170 chipset and DDR4. There's an article/news post around here somewhere showing a big increase in FPS going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-3200, some games gained up to 20 fps just from the RAM speed.

Is it necessary? No. But going to Skylake would still be a significant improvement depending on the games you play. Evaluate what games you are playing and whether or not you are happy with your fps, and look up benchmarks of those games on different generations of processors to see if the switch is worth it for you or not.

On to the 7970. I ran one for a year in 2013. They are great GPUs, but unfortunately you are a little bit wrong in your evaluation. Even one of my 380X is 15-20% faster than a 7970 (17.2% faster in 3dmark Fire Strike with both cards doing 1200mhz on air, according to the benches on my HWBOT profile.) The 7970 and 380X actually have the exact same specs but the 380X is GCN 1.2 and has faster per shader performance as well as delta color compression. I also used to have 2x 290s in Crossfire and I know without a doubt, the 290 is significantly faster. Not only that but it has double the ROPs and more texture units in addition to more shaders. The Fire Strike difference was 33.9% between my 7970 and my single 290.

On top of that, there are cards like the Fury/Fury X. The Fury X in particular has literally twice the specs of the 7970: 4096 SP, 64 ROPs, 256 TMUs. (7970 is 2048 shaders, 32 ROPs, 128 TMUs).

That's not even considering Nvidia, I will be fair and say that the 980 is around 20% faster on average than the 290/390/X, the 980ti is probably 20% faster than that, and the 1080 is at least 30% faster than the 980ti according to most reports.

So where's that leave your 7970? The first thing in the system to upgrade imo. Going with at least a Fury X or possibly a 1080 you may very well get a card that is twice as fast. This makes sense; the 7970 launched on Dec. 22nd, 2011. It's over 4 years old at this point. If it still works well for you, that's great; but if it were me, I would upgrade. $300 should get you something considerably faster.

Anyway sorry this was so long. I hope I helped, I tried to give what I thought was perspective that other posters are missing. Regards.

EDIT: JackCY: I ran 1.47v through a 4770k for over 2 years because I had a dog of a chip and that's what it took to do just 4.5ghz. It still worked when I sold it and I've had no complaints from the guy who bought it.

I can agree that my video card isn't the fastest nor the most power efficient and its a hot bastard but until my recent upgrade to a 2k monitor and running things like Skyrim at 2k with everything turned on plus mods I never saw less than 60 fps at 1080 in any other game set to full tilt that I can think of save for GTA IV and V where I did have to trim things down.

One big factor that has held me back is so few cards came with at least equal memory and the main games I play Skyrim/Fallout:NV/Fallout 4 especially once modded tend to rapidly eat vram regardless of speed or so it seemed.

I'm going to wait until AMD releases their new cards and probably even wait until black friday to see if I can't grab a top line card and be set (more or less) for another 4-5 years.

neurotix · Jun 7, 2016

I think waiting would probably be the best option.

My 380X's are placeholders for Vega, too.

What is my upgrade path? i7 3970x -> What?

Hybris

steftralala

aDyerSituation

Mhill2029

TrueForm

Hybris

Hybris

aDyerSituation

Ripple

JackCY

PontiacGTX

neurotix

Kana Chan

Hybris

neurotix

Top Contributors this Month

Recommended Communities