So in my rig at home I have an LGA 1366 i7-960. I have it overclocked to 3.3ghz with the boost at 3.5ghz. Now my question is whether or not to upgrade to a next gen processor. I just bought MSI's Lightning 770 and I'm heading off to college in August so I may not have the cash for a new motherboard and cpu. That being said I would like to keep my options open. It would be cheaper to upgrade to a better Nehalem processor but in the long run would it be worth it? My system specs are:
ASUS P6X58D-E
Intel Core i7-960
MSI GTX 770 Lightning Edition
Corsair DOMINATOR 6gb 1600mhz RAM
Corsair 600w 80+ Bronze Builder Series PSU
Cooler Master V8 180w Cooling Solution
Seagate 150gb 7200rpm HDD
WD 2Tb Green 7200rpm HDD
RAIDMAX Smiloden Case
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.
I had a i7 960 and a Gigabyte G1 Killer motherboard that I gave to my brother. It does great in games and it's definitely fast enough for everything he does. I wouldn't upgrade unless you have a good amount of money and it sounds like you don't. I don't really think it is worth it to spend $500 for a new i7 and motherboard to see a small performance increase.
What do you need the extra power for? I'm not sure an upgrade will help if it's for gaming. You're not going to see a tangible difference by just upgrading the CPU. Rather wait to see how AMD plays out the newer multicores, since you're just 3 generations behind in intel, of which nothing changed other than the fivr, integrated graphics and 0-25% at most more performance.
I've had a core2duo in the past, and have yet to build my haswell, but nehalem is quite a step up from wolfdale, and yours is an i7, I don't think you need to worry for another year or so, at least not from intel.
I agree completly. I'm build an A10-6800k rig for a good friend of mine and I'm going to do some performance testing before I hand it over. From what I've read online it is comparable to an i5 so I'm not entirely sure how well it will preform but we'll see.