Unless what you have is not working properly there is no need to replace at all. Not unless you are encoding etc where more cores would help. Personally I would buy a new GPU, if you use/need one. If not? leave it for now. I also would not buy anything Intel make, as it all represents terrible value per perf unless you are a 200 FPS gamer. Edit. Actually there is one upgrade I can recommend right now. SSDs. They have tumbled in price and you could add more storage.
^What he said... good call V-T I've been looking at replacing my i5 4670K / Z97 combo, and can't really see any benefit in moving to s1151 at the moment. As has been mentioned, CPU gains are minimal, but the possible reasons for upgrade would be: More Cores New motherboard features - multi M.2 support / USB 3.1 Gen 2 / Thunderbolt DDR4 (particularly fast and compatible DDR4 for Ryzen) is still really expensive
What are you upgrading for? Basically is there something it's now struggling with, or are you just upgrading for the hell of it?
I looked at this a little while back as I have a 4790k so again, end of line. As mentioned, the value is pretty poor to replace the motherboard and memory too so instead bought a new case, 1TB Sata SSD and a h150i to safely overclock the CPU. All that is upgrade friendly in the future when there is more justification for the cost of replacing three major components.
Before anyone can give useful recommendations for an upgrade path, we need to know what sort of things you are going to be running. e.g.: - For pure flatscreen gaming, keep the CPU and motherboard and plough all dosh into the GPU. - For VR gaming, depending on current GPU a faster CPU may be worthwhile to bring down frametimes. - For highly threaded workloads (e.g. CPU CG rendering, video transcoding) a Ryzen or even Threadripper build may make more sense. - For narrowly threaded workloads, doing nothing and saving cash may make the most sense unless you are hitting a performance limit (in which case a newer Intel CPU would be the best choice) - For tasks that use a lot of PCIe bandwidth (e.g. HDMI or HD-SDI capture cards) you may be looking towards the HEDT lines. - For tasks requiring optimum RGB, a bundle of several strings of christmas lights balled up and jammed into the case may offer the best price/perf - etc
Unless your rig is overclocked balls to the wall I really wouldn't worry too much about it. That is part of the reason why I have mainly bought locked CPUs in recent years because I'm no speed freak any more I just want reliability. And as much as people told me overclocking is safe and OK I had nothing but a ball ache with it. Maybe because both times I was looking to keep the rig long term and didn't replace it year in year out like many people who OC do? gawd knows. What I do know is I had a X79 board die which was supposedly 24 phases (before you accuse me of lying look up the MSI Big Bang Xpower 2) and MSI told me that they no longer made it (I'd only had it 11 months ffs !) and that they could not replace it as they didn't have any X79 boards in stock at all. I ended up settling for a GTX 970 which I quickly sold. But yeah, I found that like you I spent 90% of my time just sitting there peeing around. So it was a waste of leccy and a strain on the components they didn't really need. Since then I've got back to stock (I did OC my 5820k for a bit but noticed no real world difference as I game at 70hz). Now? locked Xeon. Before that? locked Xeon. Not had any failures of any kind since (touches nearest wood). All of this year's upgrade money has gone into needlessly tarty things like RGB and extra water cooling.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much either. However, if you’re concerned, I’d go down the AMD route. Longevity promised through 2020 on the same socket, and they aren’t too costly either. Can’t go wrong with them.
Not really, no. If your current rig does what you need and a new rig wouldn't improve anything, then why upgrade? I know you've said that you rely on your system for income - I'm exactly the same - but unless you're going to keep the old rig in a corner just-in-case upgrading won't help you with that. In fact, it may make it more likely that you have an outage - the bathtub curve being a real thing and all. Just because your platform is end-of-line doesn't mean it's end-of-life - replacement parts will remain readily available, albeit for ever-increasing prices. (CEX will sell you your current CPU for £105 with a two-year warranty, for example.) Personally, if I relied on my machine for work - and I do - I would be looking into buying a backup laptop before I looked into upgrading. And I did: if my desktop goes down (like it did a while back, courtesy of a remanufactured SSD I never should have bought in the first place) I can work fine, albeit a bit more slowly, on my relatively-recently-purchased laptop while I wait for a replacement part to arrive. If it's out for a longer term, I can even hook the thing up to my external monitor, keyboard, and trackball and work as though nothing's changed. You aren't doing anything to stress your current system, so you won't see any benefit from upgrading. If you wait, the system you upgrade to will be better than the system you could afford now - and while that's true at any given time, it means that waiting until you need to upgrade will get you a better system than upgrading before you need to upgrade.
So tl;dr: current performance is exactly what you want/need, and you just want newer kit for the warranty in case it fails? In that case: buy nothing. Take the money you were willing to spend on new kit now, and put it in a savings account. Worse case scenario: if/when a part fails, you have the money put aside to buy new kit, same situation as today. Best case: tiny amounts of interest (and any extra few quid you occasionally throw in) fund new kit in a few years time where you will get more bang for your buck. If you're relying on the rig for work and have a next-day service contract, yes, keeping things in warranty (and in contract) makes sense. But in that case, you'd be looking at a prebuilt workstation rather than a build-your-own rig.
That’s exactly it. I would save the cash and put it towards a new system as and when you need it. The chances are that your rig will be good for a number of years to come.
