Upgrade time....

[AndyDel]

Whats the point of buying an overclocking capable motherboard and CPU if you "might" overclock?? Its a waste of money for something you might never use at all,especially when the cooler you bought won't push a decent overclock unless you want silly high temperatures. Haswell and IB run hot due to many reasons(small die,use of TIM instead of solder under the IHS,use of process node not optimised for higher clockspeeds,but lower power,tec).

The other aspect is that the biggest improvement with SSDs is random access times,which having SATA2 or SATA3 is not going to make any difference with. If you were looking at cost effectiveness,you would have just overclocked what you have now and got youself a SATA3 card:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/PCIE-SATA-eS.../dp/B00560ZOGO

The whole shebang would have been under £100.

I’m not entirely sure where you’ve gotten the impression i might not be overclocking, i simply didn't want to concern myself with that immediately, as i clearly stated;

- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 CPU Cooler (This is just a cheap initial HSF that ive used before and quite like, till i decide which one i really want when i need to OC)

It’s not just SATA III, I also wanted USB 3.0.

Not to mention a 50% increase across the board in performance over my i7 920…

Also remember the bundle i purchased was purely due to a special offer, if i'd gotten the same bundle from Scan i'd be paying £497.99, where i purchased it for £388.64. Otherwise i'd of likely waited.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I’m not entirely sure where you’ve gotten the impression i might not be overclocking, i simply didn't want to concern myself with that immediately, as i clearly stated;

- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 CPU Cooler (This is just a cheap initial HSF that ive used before and quite like, till i decide which one i really want when i need to OC)

It’s not just SATA III, I also wanted USB 3.0.

Not to mention a 50% increase across the board in performance over my i7 920…

Also remember the bundle i purchased was purely due to a special offer, if i'd gotten the same bundle from Scan i'd be paying £497.99, where i purchased it for £388.64. Otherwise i'd of likely waited.

Yeah,I understand you got the parts cheaper than retailer,but the problem is the higher and higher you go,the more the price/performance goes wonky.

Have you actually overclocked your Core i7 920 at all or is at stock still?

So when you add the cost of the cooler you got now and the then the cost of a better cooler,its not £121 you are spending but £138(£388 excluding HSF,right?). Add £40 to £60 for another cooler later on it is £178 to £198. So even if you had to buy new RAM for the Xeon setup,so another £128 to £158??

For a 20% to 30% improvement at most?? HWBOT gives just 4.5GHZ from over 5000 submissions for the average overclock for a Core i7 4770K(although we cannot gauge how stable they are),although if you look on large enthusiast stores like OcUK and Aria,it seems to be between 4.2GHZ to 4.5GHZ on average,with the latter clocks on high end air coolers and AIO water coolers(above £40 to £50 usually). Its not really any better value for money(and probably is actually a worse off if you look at price/performance),as you are spending around 40% to 60% more at least from my calculations when you start including the need for additional cooling if overclocking. Plus the K series lack TSX which is the major addition Haswell brought to the table.

Anyway look at the normalised single core benchmarks in this article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,2974-9.html

That is with SB,but the IPC gains are not been massive even since then,and average OC clockspeeds have dropped too,while the cooler requirements have increased due to the temperature issues.

Look at a game which threads very well:

http://www.bf-blog.cz/wp-content/upl...f4procesor.jpg

The i7 930 only runs at between 2.8GHZ to 3.06GHZ so even with only 20% to 30% overclock(HWBOT lists the average overclock of a Core i7 930 as 4.25GHZ BTW so I am being artificially conservative here),you are already starting to hit a GPU bottleneck with a Geforce Titan,at 1920X1080.

Socket 1366 might be old but its hardly out(and that is when you don't even consider the six core CPUs you can get on the platform).

[AndyDel]

Nope my i7 920 is not currently overclocked, i run the same HSF on it (But i'm going to sell it on).

The way i looked at it mate is like this, i7 920 vs i7 4770k;

Image Editing (Gimp)
Stock: +40%
Overclocked: +30%

Video Encoding (Handbrake)
Stock: +42%
Overclocked: +38%

Multi-tasking (7-Zip and mplayer)
Stock: +28%
Overclocked: 7%

The above is based on Bit-tech review and 4770k OC of 4.7 which may be optimistic but i'll use it since it'll be essentially marginal.

Now not forgetting i'll have USB 3.0 and SATA III in additional to the performance and power efficiency gains, it appeared the wisest choice. Especially when you consider the Intel roadmap going forward and move to DDR4, which from what i read will likely go through a phase of adjustment not just from a board / performance point of view but price will be pretty silly till we reach Skymont i'd imagine.

One thing i do allot of is video encoding, i rip all my blurays (1:1 1080p rips) to a HP Microserver which has 11TB capacity. I then stream my movies from that to my Acer Revo R3700s in living room and master bedroom which run XBMC. Guest rooms have WDTV Lives which also stream from it. So the extra performance in that regard will come in handy.

So all things consider;

I paid £388.64 for my bundle, i feel i could roughly get £160 after postage for my i7 920 bundle.

Meaning my upgrade has cost me £228.84 (Minus HSF).

Now if i went for your suggestion, i'd be paying £267.33. Without the RAM i'd likely net around £130. Meaning an upgrade cost of £137.33.

This makes cost difference between the two would be £91.51... Not a great deal i'm sure you'd agree. I'm sure if somebody sat the two options infront of you and said "You can have 4770k bundle for around £90 more", you'd likely choose it no?

If i hadn't paid what i paid, i'd likely agree with you.. Because i'd be paying a good £117 more for the bundle i have but as things stand i didn't, so i haven't.

I'm not counting the HSF into this because i likely won't overclock till further in the future, due to this i'll likely be aiming to buy something from the used market since time is not a factor.

[AndyDel]

Well i'm all done!

In the end i changed my order slightly and got a Corsair H80, also picked up a Silverstone FT02 for £60.

Basically upgraded everything, with the exception of the 2TB HDD, PSU and 7970 Ghz which i already had.

• Intel Core i7-4770K
• Asus Z87-PRO Z87
• Corsair 16GB Vengeance Pro Blue DDR3
• Corsair Hydro Series H80
• AMD 7970 3GB Ghz
• 240GB Sandisk Extreme SSD
• 2TB Western Digital Black HDD
• Silverstone FT02 (USB 3.0 + Slot loading DVDRW)
• OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w

Managed to the i7 4770k to 4.9Ghz stable with comfortable temps, didn't get a bad firestrike score either .

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/1170828

[herulach]

Where did you get the case for £60 from?

[AndyDel]

Classifieds forum, someone had one going in perfect condition with all bits. Sold it to me for £60 inc del.