Gaming Question about upgrading processor

[bowlofspiders]

I am thinking about upgrading from my i3-540 1156 to an i5-2500k 1155. To do so, I would need to buy a new motherboard to support the socket. I was wondering if the actual performance of my build will go up or down? I use my desktop for hosting servers, video processing, heavy gaming, and a few other things.

 

[marcus134]

it'll go up of course, not only Sandy Bridge (SB) does more IPC (instructions per cycle) but it's also clocked faster and is a quad (your i3 is just a dual core with htt).

SB also introduces Quick sync witch is a h264 hardware encoder, it transcode video about twice as fast as a gtx 460 (if the software you use support quick sync)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/9
it won't really impact gaming, as games are gpu bottlenecked, though it might help in two years.

 

[bowlofspiders]

Thanks for the help, Marcus.

 

[Originality]

I believe having a stronger CPU will help immensely for servers, which do not use the GPU at all. But games are GPU based and video editing/rendering is mostly GPU based.

Don't forget that the 2500K is unlocked so over clocking it (which is fairly easy) can push performance by another 20% for CPU based tasks.