Hardware Need advice for upgrading computer

[master801]

Would it be cheaper and last longer (meaning it won't go super out-of-date any time soon) if I upgrade my CPU from a 775 Core 2 Duo to a 775 Core 2 Quad, or just jump to a LGA 1150/1155 i3/i5 quad-core?

I game very-lightly (I barely even play games now) and I also do programming which sometimes maxes out my current CPU.

This may seem like a no-brainer for most people, but I don't have much to spend and would like to choose which parts would last me the longest and what would give me the most performance.

Basically this: give me advice for parts I should choose that will give me the most performance and be cheap (although I do know that cheapness does not combine with quality nor performance).

Also to note, I don't like AMD, so please don't try to recommend me CPUs from them.

 

[GreatCrippler]

If your current board will take a Core 2 Quad, give it a shot. It's a cheap upgrade. If that doesn't work, move up.

 

[gudenau]

You will probably want to get a newer CPU, even though you would need to replace your motherboard since it is a different socket it should be worth the cost. There are still things that do not properly leverage the multiple cores and the improved architectures on the newer CPUs should give you a larger improvement. I currently have a i5-3570K, it serves me well; even when running an Ubuntu VM.

 

[KingBlank]

If you don't have a solid state drive, get one and use it as your windows boot drive, it does not need to be large - just large enough for windows, use your current drive as storage.
Even with an old processor I still think an SSD is the biggest upgrade a computer can have.

EDIT: here is one you could buy, but your current motherboard might not support its full speed (Sata3) so that would be worth checking http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digi...116011_1_8?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1455573452&sr=1-8

 

[FAST6191]

If your current board will take a Core 2 Quad, give it a shot. It's a cheap upgrade.

Is there a hidden supply of core 2 quads out there? Last year people were adapting Xeon E5450s to them (sand one of the notches and have a small jumper piece of plastic to swap some pins or something) to try to work around a general lack/expense of quad cores. http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

Back on topic DDR2 RAM of a reasonable size and clock speed still seems to be in the "we know you will pay it" prices and a DDR3 (or possibly even DDR4) supporting board and CPU might still be a viable proposition.

What programming are you doing that is such a CPU killer though? Obviously compiling ( https://xkcd.com/303/ ) but most other things should be text editing, save perhaps unless you are using some monster IDE.

 

[GreatCrippler]

Is there a hidden supply of core 2 quads out there? Last year people were adapting Xeon E5450s to them (sand one of the notches and have a small jumper piece of plastic to swap some pins or something) to try to work around a general lack/expense of quad cores. http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

Back on topic DDR2 RAM of a reasonable size and clock speed still seems to be in the "we know you will pay it" prices and a DDR3 (or possibly even DDR4) supporting board and CPU might still be a viable proposition.

What programming are you doing that is such a CPU killer though? Obviously compiling ( https://xkcd.com/303/ ) but most other things should be text editing, save perhaps unless you are using some monster IDE.

I snagged a few a couple months back on ebay in the $30-$50 range.

 

[master801]

If your current board will take a Core 2 Quad, give it a shot. It's a cheap upgrade. If that doesn't work, move up.

Now that you mention that, I may have to try that. Worst I can do is probably end up selling it on my local Craigslist.

You will probably want to get a newer CPU, even though you would need to replace your motherboard since it is a different socket it should be worth the cost. There are still things that do not properly leverage the multiple cores and the improved architectures on the newer CPUs should give you a larger improvement. I currently have a i5-3570K, it serves me well; even when running an Ubuntu VM.

If upgrading to Quad 2 Core CPU doesn't work, I'll go with your recommendation and upgrade to a new generation.

If you don't have a solid state drive, get one and use it as your windows boot drive, it does not need to be large - just large enough for windows, use your current drive as storage.
Even with an old processor I still think an SSD is the biggest upgrade a computer can have.

EDIT: here is one you could buy, but your current motherboard might not support its full speed (Sata3) so that would be worth checking http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digi...116011_1_8?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1455573452&sr=1-8

I've heard that SSDs die more quickly than platter hard-drives though, that's what I'm worried the most about. Thanks for the link though.

Is there a hidden supply of core 2 quads out there? Last year people were adapting Xeon E5450s to them (sand one of the notches and have a small jumper piece of plastic to swap some pins or something) to try to work around a general lack/expense of quad cores. http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

Back on topic DDR2 RAM of a reasonable size and clock speed still seems to be in the "we know you will pay it" prices and a DDR3 (or possibly even DDR4) supporting board and CPU might still be a viable proposition.

What programming are you doing that is such a CPU killer though? Obviously compiling ( https://xkcd.com/303/ ) but most other things should be text editing, save perhaps unless you are using some monster IDE.

I'm mainly looking at getting one from Ebay, even though it's been pre-owned.

Aren't Xeons used mainly for servers though? Wouldn't upgrading to a Xeon give me a disadvantage over a normal CPU when programming? Aren't server CPUs mainly for threads and not cores?

Android Studio is the IDE I used, it tends to max my CPU out when, as you said, compiling, I mainly use it for my pet projects though.


Thanks for replying, everyone!

 

[gudenau]

Now that you mention that, I may have to try that. Worst I can do is probably end up selling it on my local Craigslist.



If upgrading to Quad 2 Core CPU doesn't work, I'll go with your recommendation and upgrade to a new generation.



I've heard that SSDs die more quickly than platter hard-drives though, that's what I'm worried the most about. Thanks for the link though.



I'm mainly looking at getting one from Ebay, even though it's been pre-owned.

Aren't Xeons used mainly for servers though? Wouldn't upgrading to a Xeon give me a disadvantage over a normal CPU when programming? Aren't server CPUs mainly for threads and not cores?

Android Studio is the IDE I used, it tends to max my CPU out when, as you said, compiling, I mainly use it for my pet projects though.


Thanks for replying, everyone!

Modern SSDs are not that failure prone, but if they die you basically can not get the data back. Make regular backups and check the health of the drive every so often.

 

[master801]

Modern SSDs are not that failure prone, but if they die you basically can not get the data back. Make regular backups and check the health of the drive every so often.

I'd rather not take the inconvenient task of checking it every so often, but I'll consider it an option; worst it can do is die when all of my data is on it.

 

[KingBlank]

I'd rather not take the inconvenient task of checking it every so often, but I'll consider it an option; worst it can do is die when all of my data is on it.

yeah, its very unlikely to just die. I keep all my important stuff off the SSD and just put windows and and programs that are always running on it.

 

[raystriker]

Just go for a good cheap 6th gen i3 or Pentium, they're okayish in the 'future proof' section.

 

[dfsa3fdvc1]

I've heard that SSDs die more quickly than platter hard-drives though, that's what I'm worried the most about. Thanks for the link though.

When will uninformed people let this myth die?
SSD failure rates aren't as bad as you may think. If price wasn't a factor I'd much rather entrust my data to SSD over standard platter drives.

Check out this endurance test where someone constantly wrote data to SSDs to see when they would fail.
The earliest failure happened at 300 Terabytes of written data.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

Also, advice, get an SSD. As the other user said it is literally the single best upgrade you can do on an old computer. They're very inexpensive now. I got one for $20.

 

[gudenau]

When will uninformed people let this myth die?
SSD failure rates aren't as bad as you may think. If price wasn't a factor I'd much rather entrust my data to SSD over standard platter drives.

Check out this endurance test where someone constantly wrote data to SSDs to see when they would fail.
The earliest failure happened at 300 Terabytes of written data.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

Also, advice, get an SSD. As the other user said it is literally the single best upgrade you can do on an old computer. They're very inexpensive now. I got one for $20.

But recovering data from platters is much easier.

 

[dfsa3fdvc1]

But recovering data from platters is much easier.

Uh, WTF are you talking about?

 

[Originality]

There are companies that can do raw data recovery from HDD platters directly, at great expense. However the same service is not available for SSD chips.

Anyway, all reports I've read just now suggest SSDs have equal or greater lifespans than HDDs. Of course, my experience tells me it's very situational. I've had plenty of Seagate HDDs die on me within a year, where as of the 10 or so Samsung HDDs in my house, only one has ever failed on me in over a decade. The general average for a HDD is 5-7 years of life (but I've seen some that work even after 20 years) where as reports are turning up of modern SSDs being able to last 10 years (e.g. Around 2PB of writes) with Intel drives lasting the longest.

Likewise with SSDs, my OCZ Vertex 3 using a Sandforce 2200 controller (with a known design flaw that makes them very prone to early failure, improved with later firmware updates) lasted me nearly 5 years before having its first major fail (large corrupted sectors causing fatal IO errors). After migrating my data to a new Samsung SSD (lucky I was able to) I used SecureErase on it and it's now actually working good as new again (although I wouldn't trust it with an OS anymore, it handles large games just fine).

 

[FAST6191]

Aren't Xeons used mainly for servers though? Wouldn't upgrading to a Xeon give me a disadvantage over a normal CPU when programming? Aren't server CPUs mainly for threads and not cores?

Android Studio is the IDE I used, it tends to max my CPU out when, as you said, compiling, I mainly use it for my pet projects though.


Thanks for replying, everyone!

Granted most of the benchmarks are synthetic and by most accounts when OCed the xeons do very well and these guys did not manage it but http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5450-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650
There is basically nothing in it.
I was not really suggesting it as a viable option here though. It was more a passing remark to another poster. The reason people were doing it was because server CPU prices drop like a stone after a few years and as they are almost electrically identical (give or take the two minor pin changes of but a few mm) they could be adapted. Vendors however know people will pay good money for a quad core (moving to an i5 or something means new CPU, new mobo, most likely new RAM and that is not cheap) so priced them high, they do the same with DDR2 RAM (large amounts of fast RAM makes for a demonstrable speed improvement for a lot of things so people will pay over what you might expect for old tech).

As for SSDs then they are fine. If your backup policy consists of "well I can try to recover the platters" then you are already screwed.

 

[master801]

There are companies that can do raw data recovery from HDD platters directly, at great expense. However the same service is not available for SSD chips.

Anyway, all reports I've read just now suggest SSDs have equal or greater lifespans than HDDs. Of course, my experience tells me it's very situational. I've had plenty of Seagate HDDs die on me within a year, where as of the 10 or so Samsung HDDs in my house, only one has ever failed on me in over a decade. The general average for a HDD is 5-7 years of life (but I've seen some that work even after 20 years) where as reports are turning up of modern SSDs being able to last 10 years (e.g. Around 2PB of writes) with Intel drives lasting the longest.

Likewise with SSDs, my OCZ Vertex 3 using a Sandforce 2200 controller (with a known design flaw that makes them very prone to early failure, improved with later firmware updates) lasted me nearly 5 years before having its first major fail (large corrupted sectors causing fatal IO errors). After migrating my data to a new Samsung SSD (lucky I was able to) I used SecureErase on it and it's now actually working good as new again (although I wouldn't trust it with an OS anymore, it handles large games just fine).

Granted most of the benchmarks are synthetic and by most accounts when OCed the xeons do very well and these guys did not manage it but http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5450-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650
There is basically nothing in it.
I was not really suggesting it as a viable option here though. It was more a passing remark to another poster. The reason people were doing it was because server CPU prices drop like a stone after a few years and as they are almost electrically identical (give or take the two minor pin changes of but a few mm) they could be adapted. Vendors however know people will pay good money for a quad core (moving to an i5 or something means new CPU, new mobo, most likely new RAM and that is not cheap) so priced them high, they do the same with DDR2 RAM (large amounts of fast RAM makes for a demonstrable speed improvement for a lot of things so people will pay over what you might expect for old tech).

As for SSDs then they are fine. If your backup policy consists of "well I can try to recover the platters" then you are already screwed.

That makes me feel a little bit better about SDDs, any major indicators to when it'll start to fail?

 

[gudenau]

That makes me feel a little bit better about SDDs, any major indicators to when it'll start to fail?

You *should* have windows yell at you IIRC. I just keep my SSD as a boot drive. Just remember to disable the page file for it, that can obliterate a SSD.

 

[master801]

You *should* have windows yell at you IIRC. I just keep my SSD as a boot drive. Just remember to disable the page file for it, that can obliterate a SSD.

Thanks for the info about the page file, I always have a page file available on my computer, I'll try to remember to disable it if and when I get an SSD.


I'll try upgrading my CPU to a Quad 2 Core and also get an SSD.

If upgrading my CPU doesn't work, then I'll switch to the new 1155 generation.

 

[Originality]

Two things about the pagefile thing, I've read from Microsoft (so take it how you will) that, based on telemetry, SSDs use about 40 times more read functions than write functions, which isn't actually all that much. This means that the pagefile does not significantly contribute towards the maximum write cycles that SSDs can endure, so you don't actually gain much out of disabling the pagefile. Plus, that "myth" (I don't like calling it a myth when it has some merit) originates from the first generation of SSDs, and thanks to measures taken in later generations (e.g. overprovisioning), the small section that the pagefile takes up doesn't even impact the lifespan of the rest of the SSD.

Second thing is that disabling the pagefile can prevent memory dumps on crashes/BSoDs, making it more difficult to find out what might cause them.

Then again, it's up to you if you want the pagefile on or not. Same with indexing, and the other ways the internet says to "optimise" Windows for SSDs. It doesn't hurt much either way.