Upgrade from i3 530 - wait for Haswell?

[SKiNFreak]

I am running an i3 530 and on the whole it has been a great chip. More recently I have encoding a lot of video and have really noticed this is a pain. Looking to do an upgrade but the inevitable impending platform refresh this year has me wondering.
I rarely game and am using the onboard graphics - I tend to use my PC for productivity stuff and web aside from the video encoding and audio encoding. I suspect that any Ivybridge Core i5 would do the trick and give me a whacking great boost, so is it worth waiting? At some point I want to add a much bigger monitor, and at that point might opt for discrete graphics but as it stands my 17" Iiyama LCD is not going anywhere.

Thoughts?

[kompukare]

I would wait for Haswell. AXV2 is meant to be a major upgrade for certain workloads (it requires re-writes of software though) and Intel Quick Sync should get a boost too.

Have a look at your CPU vs i7-3770K:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/118?vs=551

Not sure if you want to spend that much but if you do a lot of encoding the i7 might be worth it. Having said that if all you do is re-encoding and Quick Sync is good enough for you then any Ivy Bridge which supports Quick Sync (i3+ AFAIK) will make a huge difference already.

Also if you don't game, HD4000 (top end Ivy Bridge) is already fast enough to drive 1080P or higher easily and Haswell is major IGP upgrade so I don't see the need to get a discrete card at all.

[SKiNFreak]

Cool. I will save my pennys now then and wait for Haswell. It looks like those features will be worth waitign for for the sake of a few months.

[SKiNFreak]

Have a look at your CPU vs i7-3770K:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/118?vs=551

It looks like even a 3570 would be a huge increase in performance for the encoding - it is a massive difference...I might steal my wife's laptop for a while. She's got an i5 in there for video encoding!

[scaryjim]

If you want a lower entry-cost platform that has a little life in it yet, and multi-threaded performance is your main requirement (i.e. video encoding) why not consider a switch to AMD FX? For ~ £100 you can get a 6-thread processor that will utterly bury your i3 for encoding.

Here's the anandtech bench comparison for the FX6300 to your i3:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/118?vs=699

The FX6300 is £101 at ebuyer at the minute: http://www.ebuyer.com/409191-amd-fx-...-fd6300wmhkbox

Here's a comparison between the FX8350 (8 threads) and the i5-3570k:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/701?vs=697

It's fairly even in the encoding benchmarks. The i5 3570k is £175, whereas the FX 8350 is around £150.

I'm not sure, but I believe AMD are meant to be releasing one more generation of FX processor on socket AM3+, too.

If I was you, I think I'd upgrade to an FX 6300 now - you can get an appropriate motherboard with integrated graphics for comfortably under £50, recycle your existing DDR3 RAM, and do the whole upgrade for < £150 - plus you should be able to sell on your i3 and mobo to get some of that back. It'll give you big gains now for your encoding tasks, and you can wait and see what happens with haswell and AMDs next update, steamroller, without being frustrated by your lack of encoding speed in the mean time!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Another thing,Handbrake has been demonstrated with OpenCL acceleration and there is also an OpenCL based FLAC encoder called FLACCL:

http://forums.hexus.net/software/272...enchmarks.html

So,I would consider also getting a discrete graphics card too at some point.

I suppose one of the cheapest ways to improve your encoding performance is to get a secondhand Core i5 750 or 760, or a secondhand Core i7 860 or 870. However,these lack AVX and FMA support which will be increasingly useful for video encoding and they lack an IGP too.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Also the FX6300 is competitive with the SB Core i5 CPUs for video encoding too and supports things like AVX and FMA.SB and IB only support AVX ATM.

Here are some comparisons from HC:

http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/im...FX-4300-53.jpg

http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/im...FX-4300-57.jpg

Here are some comparisons from hardware.info:

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/3314...video-encoding

Here are some comparisons from Guru3D:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages..._review,5.html

Here are some comparisons from techspot:

http://www.techspot.com/review/586-a...300/page5.html

Here are some comparisons from Anandtech:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51117.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51118.png

[dacads]

FX-8320 could also be an option..

[davitalord]

can i upgrade i5 cpu?

[davitalord]

thanks