Cpu and Motherboard Upgrade

Looking to replace my GA-X58A-UD3R and my i7 920

My current rig has 4 data drives in raid 5 on a sata 1 chipset and two SSD in raid 0 and two dvd drives and a radeon hd 7870 and a h110 cpu cooler 

my budget is around 350.

Are you brand loyal? Particularly AMD vs Intel.

 

Not really i just would need a new setup that would help use the full power of what I have.

For $350, I'd recommend an AMD FX 8320 with an Asus M5A99FX PRO or a Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

I like Kiaxa's suggestion. I don't know how much of a difference you would see between the Sabertooth and the Pro. Scanning over the spec sheets on Asus.com, it seems like the differences are mainly the number of I/O options. You mentioned that you have about 6 SATA connections (assuming that your optical drives are SATA). The Pro has 7 connectors, so you'd be almost maxed out, but the Sabertooth has 8. I'd recommend going to the Asus website and Newegg and comparing the two boards. You can decide which one works best for you from that info.

I forgot to mention that the Sabertooth has an 8+2 power design while the Pro has a 6+2 power design. This means that the Sabertooth will overclock a little better, but you probably won't notice the difference unless you are watercooling.

EDIT: I take this back, based on further looking into the original quick google search

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/318/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8320_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-920.html

Just saying... It's not even an upgrade... till you overclock it anyways...

EDIT: I retract this statement based on the information revealed in a separate thread. See my post below.

Damn Panda, you're right. I kind of forgot that the 970 was the enthusiast CPU of its day. Further research shows that frankcard will need a nice overclock from an 8320 or 8350 to get much performance increase, but will probably want a 4670 or better to see a non-overclocked increase.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/20Gpc

This is your best price/increased performance upgrade path (it's not $350, but it's not too far off)... the Xeon chip is better than the i7-920 in every way, and the mobo gives you 8 SATA 6Gb/s ports... the 4670K would also be an upgrade in everything but intensive data use programs... AMD just doesn't offer anything that's justifiable to spend $350 on... which goes to show how far behind they actually are in CPU development...

Point being, if you're going to buy an upgrade... buy an upgrade... get the Xeon (which is a non-overclockable i7 without an iGPU) Xeons also have a better average ASIC quality due to being engineered for business servers...

To get an 8320/50 would basically be paying $350 for slower single threading and the ability to overclock...

Just my two cents...

You could maybe go with the 1230v3 and a cheaper motherboard since you won't be overclocking.

So... this happened:

https://teksyndicate.com/forum/cpu/does-irk-anyone-else/172902

Basically, no one is absolutely sure if you will see a performance increase with the originally recommended options, but there are people in the other thread that say you absolutely will.