[dpoverlord]

Hey friends,

My friend is planning to upgrade his system to get more power on his GPU and I was going to recommend that instead of upgrading his 3450 to a 3770 (non-K) for $170 he should instead get a Xeon e3-1275 for $100-$150 on Ebay.
Quote:

Originally Posted by mosie100
What are your thoughts? Am I wrong on this upgrade path?

So I'm looking at upgrading several pieces of my rig in the next few months and since I'm limited by my mobo was looking at upgrading my CPU first, then go for my GPU.
What do you all think? Here is my rig at the moment:

|| CPU: Intel Core i5-3450 3.1GHz ||
GPU: Sapphire R9 290 ||
PSU: Corsair HX850 ||
MOBO: ASRock Z75 Pro3 LGA 1155 Intel Z75 ||
Monitor: BenQ GW2760 27" ||
RAM: 4 x 4GB Corsair DDR 1333 || H
DD: Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 1TB Hard Drive ||
Case: NZXT Source 210 Midtower ||

Do you think the i7 3770 will be a decent upgrade? I'd rather not upgrade my MOBO at the moment and milk it for all it's worth.

 

[chessmyantidrug]

An E3-1275 v2 would be nice if it's cheaper than the i7 counterpart. I'm not sure how much he would feel the upgrade though. If he doesn't already have a SSD, I would recommend one of those first. Moving my Windows installation to a SSD made the biggest, most noticeable difference with my system.

 

[keikei]

For dat kind of $ you may be able to find a better used gpu.

 

[chessmyantidrug]

For 1080p gaming, an R9 290 is more than adequate. Now is a bad time to upgrade the video card anyway. Prices for midrange cards are still inflated, though they have been trending downwards recently.

 

[grss1982]

Comparing the two, it seems the 3770 has the advantage:

https://ark.intel.com/products/52277/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1275-8M-Cache-3_40-GHz

https://ark.intel.com/products/65719/Intel-Core-i7-3770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz

a) PCI 3.0 for 3770.
b) Max Turbo Frequency for the 3770.
c) Memory bandwidth for the 3770.

Seems like the 3770 has a slight edge over the Xeon.

On a related note can you OC that Xeon?

 

[ep45-ds3l]

I'm currently using a Xeon e3 1245/Z68ap-d3/DDR3 2133mhz CL10 4x4 16GB/GTX 1080ti Strix
It's a place holder until the 8700ks come back into stock as I sold my x99 cpu/mobo. I have had very little issue playing games at 1440P 144hz G-Sync with this older setup as it was originally a 2500K that I upgraded to a cheap Ebay Xeon. That being said, the 3770 will have a slightly better IPC than Sandy Bridge and also should allow or overclocking if his mobo supports per core speed and using the cpu bin steps to around 4.1ghz I think on along 4 cores.
Also make sure to pick up the fastest memory the mobo will run and 16GB as games require more memory, that 1333mhz is pretty slow.