Feel like i've had this i7 920 for far to long, so while not needed i am going to make the jump socket 2011 in a couple weeks. Eyeing up the I7 3820 and Asus Sabertooth x79. Was wondering if it's going to be worth paying the extra for some 1866 rated ram? I wont be going to the limit with the over clocking and probably settle around 4.5~ with a H100 cooling it. Pro tips?
Your existing memory should overclock to 1700 - 1800MHz if you're lucky (Prime95 testing is a must though) so there's unlikely to be much benefit even with memory-intensive work - unless your motherboard lacks the ability to change the memory speed multiplier. As for upgrades, it would probably be best to hold fire until Ivy Bridge if you can - if you need a speed-up in the meantime there are other things to consider short of a new system (bigger SSD or extra SSDs for a RAID-0 array, another 570 in SLI) but what's best depends on where you feel your system's shortcomings are. It is pretty new though so if it is running slow then it's quite likely to be software related (a fresh Windows install would be the best option then).
What makes you think that it's been far too long? It's like a couple years old at most, CPU's haven't evolved much between LGA 1366 and 2011.
This is bit-tech.. many of us buy crap we don't need all the time just because we like playing around with it I just want to know if there is a clear advantage in over clocking or performance with a 1866 kit. WIll be looking at 16gb so i can play around making a small ram disc.
I don't know your question. But what I can say is that your 920 will be good for gaming for another 4 years. Save your money. Buy something more useful, like a descent monitor, good keyboard and mouse. Dedicated sound card, better speakers.. or give to a donation.
I wouldn't bother unless you are doing anything that is memory intensive. Despite what people where say, with video encoding, it DOES make a difference. Not massive, but if a video takes an hour to encode, you'll shave a few minutes off. In benchmarks, it is more noticeable, but even then, switching from 1600 to 2133 ram only netted me a couple of hundred points. The real question is, do you need sandybridge E at all? If you're not video editing, rendering, encoding, or doing any of these CPU intensive tasks that benefit from the extra cores, then I would say go with Ivy Bridge when it comes out. If all you do is game, you'll get far more benefit by spending the cash you were going to blow on a X79 board and CPU (assuming the sabertooth and 3820K that's £470 approx) on a GPU upgrade. Plus.. with the 3820 the gains over regular SB aren't astounding. Ive Bridge, or GPU upgrade. That's what I'd do.
I tend to agree with the others, as Pookey says, it would better to balance your rig out with a new GPU, or wait for IB and jump on that train, or wait for people like Trash and TG (amoung others) to get the itch and buy their old stuff - many like they treasure the kit they own, so most of it is like new.
I had 8gb of 1600mhz ram. When I ditched it for 16gb 1866 ram I could feel the difference right away in windows. Everything smoother and snappier.
RAM speed with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge has really minimal performance gain, see the tests here at bit-tech when Sandy Bridge was launched. In case of AMD and older platforms, there is some gain, but the biggest gain is for Llano and their IGP, where you can see the difference between DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1866.
Yes, as Faug said the mem clock speed has little effect on performance with these processors so it must be due to the capacity.
Another vote here for "save your money". Given the quad channel memory you are quite unlikely to run into memory bandwidth limitations.
Tempting isn't it, to go and upgrade despite everyone being fine? I always had in my mind that I would upgrade my 920 to Ivy bridge, but I track my CPU usage in games and it really is not struggling at all. I've been spending my money on SSDs and graphics. You wont notice the move from 1600MHz to 1800MHz, nor from triple channel to quad channel, unless you are into very serious memory limited applications. 99.99% of people wouldn't tell the difference outside of benchmarks. Are you doing 3D modelling work or something like that? I vote splashing out on Kepler when it comes out, buying a new SSD for your boot drive, and using your existing SSD as a games drive (assuming you game ...). That'll breath a whole new life into an already perfectly good machine.
Was thinking Ivy Bridge too, but it doesn't look like we will be seeing it for some time yet. New ssd would have no effect with the sata bottleneck. i would need a whole new board. May upgrade gpu later with kepler. Total cost of jumping to 2011 is only about £250 after selling my gear, (mobo/cpu/ram/fenrir/Asus sata 6 pos card) Not a hard pill to swallow. That's a sabertooth x79 and I7 3820 + 16gb 1866 Already have a good monitor keyboard/mouse/soundcard/speakers/headphones etc
