In the past, I've tried to buy decent, capable motherboards with mature chipsets and good support. I've then usually bought the cheapest CPU that would do what I needed, overclocked it and known that I can drop a better one in at a later date when they're cheap. My most recent example of this is my current socket 939 PC. I bought it with an Athlon 3000+ and when 939 went end of life I snapped up an X2 3800+ for £40! It slipped in and boosted performance considerably, overclocked better and is still going strong today. So, if I were to apply the same strategy today, I would probably be looking at an i3 530 as the cheap CPU and a MATX Gigabyte board. I read somewhere here the other day a comment from a staffer indicating that either the P or H versions of the boards were better with i3s, 5s, or 7s or something like that. My question is, which board is more likely to cater to an i7, somewhere down the road? Or do I need to consider a more expensive and fully featured board?
Intel is rubbish at keeping things backwards compatible unfortunately. Both the 1156 and 1366 sockets will be out of date once sandy bridge comes in next year. AMD has been much better and I expect that someone will cover this. On the intel side I would grab a 1366 board and find a cheap i7 920. You know that there will be at least 6-core upgrades on this socket.
I bought my dual core Athlon after they went EOL. I don't care what Intel are up to. Dropping a cheap i3 now (or maybe even the Pentium) in a board and knowing that in 12/18mths I could put an 1156 i7 in the same board with no issues is what I'm talking about. That makes for a cheap system now, which will still be great for a while. 6 cores don't interest me and 1366 is hardly cheap when compared with i3. Bear in mind I'm currently running a 5yr old CPU which does everything I want except play games!!!
I would go i3 and 55 series mobo. At a later date you will be able to upgrade your processor. I would recommend getting 1600mhz ram for the overclocking.
Thanks, but that's 1366. So out of my price range. That's exactly what I'm talking about. My question is, do I want an H55 or P55 for the best compatibility/stability/overclocking with an 1156 i7 down the road?
They're essentially the same chipset from what I understand (which is pretty much just a southbridge anyway), just that H55 has the ability to output video from the onboard GPU. If you don't want that, then save a bit of cash and get a P55 board. Otherwise, I really don't think it makes much difference. Not in terms of performance, anyway - we're probably talking about fractions of a percent if anything, so it's not worth worrying about, especially if you're not going to venture into watercooling/extreme overclocking territory.
to me the only advantage an i7 has over an i5 is the added pci-e lanes and triple channel memory. However, i've not seen this effect my games or apps in the slightest. (Photoshop, dreamweaver etc over 2 screens.)
I'm talking about an 1156 i7, not 1366. That's what I thought, but I'm sure I read here somewhere here that the i7s were more comfortable in P boards or something like that. I can't remember who wrote it, but it was a BT staffer. I just wanna make sure I leave the door open for an upgrade down the line...
What about AMD: Asus M4A785TD-M AM3 phenom II 535 or maybe Athlon/Phenom II X3 Cheap as chips yet capable. The AM3 socket takes just about every AMD chip out there - including the stellar 6-cores ... Which you say you don't want - but there is your future upgrade.
Neither AMD or Intel are keeping their sockets. All the AM2/AM3, LGA 1156/1366 are going to be end of life next year. The future intel processors; sandy bride are going to be on the intel LGA 1155 socket and LGA 2011 socket. For AMD, they have done radical changes as well. They are launching their first product from the ATI/AMD merger thing; the fusion processors. Which will be on a all new socket called the FS1. So your probably not going to keep a motherboard for future upgrades.
Agreed, but I think he's happy to upgrade later to something that's cool now ... If you're going Intel, just grab a Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H and an i3-530.
That's EXACTLY what I'm talking about! I know sockets change, I'm not stupid. But say an i7-860 for example is way out of my range now, but when it goes end of life, I might be able to snap up a bargain. If not no biggy, but it's nice to have the option. That's how I've done it before. But if a H55 board gets funny about the earlier non-IGPU chips, that's no good. See what I mean? As for AMD, for the longest time, I was reading about and considering an Asus 785G board and a Phenom II 550BE. But the price difference between that and i3-530 seemed tiny. Maybe it's different now....
Well here's the current CPU support list for that GA-H55M-UD2H. That old Internet has all sorts of great info ...
Yeah - on the budget end, go AMD and be happy Upgrade to a Phenom X6 for bucket loads of extra power when you're ready.
Found the comment I saw in the first place: So it seems that actually the ideal of dropping an i7 into a H55 board down the line isn't so ideal after all. AMD is cheap now, and if I was planning to build something to just forget out, I'd probably still go 550BE. But now I'm wondering about longevity, as my current PC has lasted 5 years. I have PCI-E, so I could upgrade my PSU and GPU and probably play a few older games like CoH and GRAW (both of which I enjoy immensely on my XPS laptop, but even that is struggling now as it's 3yrs old). It looks like I might have to consider a whole new machine and if it's to be upgradeable at all in the future with end of line stock or eBay etc. but still last for years to come even without a CPU upgrade it's gonna need rethink. Thanks for all your input though. I really will have to think some more!
Clive was looking at extreme overclocking at that point ... I doubt you'd actually find a difference that would be noticeable in use.
