LOL, are you telling me that you upgraded from a 6 core AMD chip to a SB Core i5-2500K? I'm on a Q9550 Core 2 Quad and I still haven't been able to justify an upgrade to anything out there right now. Fortunately, my model has the 12MB L2 Cache....and that gives me a fair amount of performance over the 6MB versions of the C2Q's.
You have a severe case of upgraditis. I had a coworker upgrade from a core i7-920 to a Core i7-2600k, and he was the worst case that I had witnessed.
It's all good, I'm not judging. I just don't push my computer enough to need the extra power. That's a fact. And I have lots of other hobbies, and cars and mortgages, and insurance, and bills and kids, etc.
Which model Thuban did you upgrade from? And did you already have an Intel board, and were you able to salvage the Ram from the AMD system?
I know the 2500K is great because of the OC potential, just seems like a really expensive upgrade. Was the AMD setup unable to OC? Was it a really low end, and with a crummy board?
I'm just curious, because my 1100 even at stock speeds provides all the cycles my 6990 needs, which is quite a hefty task. At 4ghz it's pretty insane. What type of workloads are you putting theh 2500 through that have the X6 unable to compete? I feel they compete fairly well, but.. I believe ya, just curious where the X6 failed so badly. With the right cooler and board ya can squeeze good numbers out of them, but no doubt they run much hotter than any SB chip.
I'm kind of the same way though, I just don't do it too often. I don't need Bulldozer at all, but I guess I'll be doing what you did, in a way, when they start shipping.
I had a 1055T. I really never OC it except enough to get my 1600 ram up to speed. AMDs are that way you know, everything is 1333. I hear bulldozer is changing that. As an aside, yes I had a crummy board MSI to be exact. But, I built a new system, not because I needed it, but because I just wanted to. It's OK to think I am crazy, because I am. I have folders of Doctors reports that say I have brain damage- so I can prove that you are right. I have never been able to consider building a computer in my life. So, I just decided to do it about 2 years ago. I was surprised at how easy it was and also how much enjoyment I got out of doing it. I have probably built 6 since then. Just because I wanted to. Its a good thing too. 5 days after I built this one my AMD MB died. So, A MB and CPU and I'll build another one. That's why I'm hoping Bulldozer lives up to its hype. If you had a sandy bridge I think you would understand what I was saying. To give you an example. when I first got it I set it up and ran it stock. After a few days, I said I wonder how it really OCs. I changed nothing except the multiplier. I changed it from 33 to 42 at stock voltage. It took off at 4200 through several hours of prime without issue at stock voltage. I got a little more curious, so I reduced the voltage by .050. No problem. Passed prime. Its running at 4200 right now at 1.184. You can't ask more than that from any chip. Temp is 39C.
Enough of my rambling, but I'm not against Bulldozer. I have high hopes for it.
To be fair he is probably doing some serious heavy lifting stuff, especially if a 1055 wasnt' good enough for him. (I don't think it was a smart upgrade, but running the 1055 in the first place certainly isn't overboard; that's what I mean)
A Q9550 would bottleneck me, bad, it would run about the same as my 965@ stock, which is great, but just not enough for very heavy editing and eyefinity gaming, things like this. Though I'm not sure what Essenbe's workloads are, he may very well be justified in upgrading.
If you're not doing any real heavy work then sure, why upgrade, wait and wait and your next build will be technically, better and better. I guess.
Yeah, I haven't done PC Gaming in a number of years. I just moved to consoles, they suit me better and I NEVER have to worry about system requirements. With my PC in the basement, it's often impossible with kids to hide in the basement and play games. With my consoles, connected to my living room TV, i have a big screen, and easy access to keep an eye on the kids. And by moving away from pc gaming, it makes using my 80GB SSD and staying at less than 50% capacity pretty easy. The only games I have played in the past year on this box are Call of Duty, World at War, Crysis, Wolfenstein, and Star Craft II. Running on a single monitor at 1920x1080 or less for these games is a piece of cake for my CPU. Even my video card is surprisingly holding up well, an Nvidia 9800GTX+.
The only heavy stuff that I do is Video Editing with Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD 10 Platinum. I take footage from my Sony HD camcorder and my older Canon MiniDV camcorder and render it either to 720x480 (for my Canon) or 1920x1080 (for my Sony), using the Sony AVC format and saving as an MP4. It takes my box about 3 minutes per 1 minute of actual video and my CPU load is usually floating around 50-60% doing this.
The only other thing that I do to really put any load on my box is run virtual machines..mostly with VMWare Player 3.x. I test things for work and often run Exchange Servers, SQL servers, test domains, Linux boxes, Apache, Tomcat, etc. But these VM's are more RAM intensive than anything else. With 2-3 VM's running, my CPU rarely hits 15%. I also run VMWare ESXi under VMWare Player with OpenFiler as iSCSI storage space so that I can setup and test a full VMWare vSphere suite on a single box. Again, for my workloads, it's a simple task for my PC.
As an aside, I could never stand consoles. No game runs at 1080p or barely 720p, they are instead running at 1024 x 600 or slightly higher. They all have low draw draw distances, make extensive use of blur and smearing to hide the fact they have no grunt for AA, capped at 30FPS, look all round poor and games now annoyingly come on 2 discs. All of the hardware is also over 5 years old. But I digress, carry on.
Yeah, but none of this bothers me. I'm playing the games on a 720p plasma and they look fine. Without a doubt, consoles have been graphics, but the video card alone costs more than the console does...let alone all of the other components that go with it. I'm not here to try talking anybody into switching to console gaming. I'm just explaining that I don't require PC power for gaming, as i don't usually use it for that. I accept the tradeoffs of the consoles...for the simplicity, and lack of upgrades, drivers, hunting down patches manually. And I appreciate the fact that aside from network access, everybody playing is on an even playing field.
And yeah, the hardware is 5 years old, but is holding up pretty well. I wouldn't want to replace my console every 12-24 months.
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