Don't give up but the hard part isn't getting the board it is getting the choice parts that people like to brag about here. I got two 486 systems and a good one is one that will allow for drives over 504mb without making much of a fuss. As for that 6800 ultra and q8300 you got lucky!

I put all my faith and hope into maybe one day I find an entire working 486 that has been lofted/garaged/skipped or maybe even in some old building that I am employed to renovate. Perhaps I'm charged with taking down an old corportate building, and while I'm cruising around I find the old computer room. Full of 486's and 386's and a Pentium 60Mhz server. Perhaps....

And yes that Q8300 runs sweet in his machine. I charged him a VERY fair price and took his old e6300 (one that I gave him years ago) as part payment. I knew me and that 6300 would one day be reunited. Can't wait to see how far I can OC it on todays cooling systems ^^

you are lucky, the q8300 alone is probably worth some $100
I live in a part of the world where is hard to have access to old hardware, so I basically rely on the high prices from ebay or something similar to get access to some parts I need/want 😒

I had no idea how fast that q8300 actually is. If I took my i3 back to stock speeds (3.06ghz) I think the q8300 is probably on a par with it gaming wise, and most definitely faster than my i3 in multitasking and encoding. Seems he got a really good deal! 😁

Presuming I get any spare money around the holidays I plan to buy an i5-750 and drop it straight into my existing motherboard, selling my i3 for £30-£40 to go towards the cost. I will probably OC the i5 to around 3.8Ghz for stability. This will be the first quad core I have owned. But to be fair, there is nothing out there that this i3-540 @ 4.2Ghz can't handle. I am still GPU limited, and as every game released apart from indie scene are designed for the consoles, upgrading now just seems a total waste of money. I will probably get that i5 and then call it a day. The i5-750 when OC'ed is a fairly large amount faster than this i3-540, but that begs the question, why the hell spend money on a Sandybridge i7? They are insanely fast, and Dishonored runs just fine on any decent 2007 dual core PC. So ... whats the point? Benchmarking? You need more money than sense. Unless you're into video encoding in a big way it's just a total waste of money.

I remember 10-15 years ago, 12 months was a lifetime of improvement and change in the PC world. Not only hardware, but the quality of games/software improved in parallel. These days that's just not the case.

I got an i5 760 and it is so much better than my old 775 system 😀
I got a q8200 that I have running at 3.25ghz and still manage to undervolt the chip. 1.16v, but the sad part is that my 780i board is just too slow to really make the most out of that cpu even with ddr2 1066 🙁

My Q9450 overclocked to 3.45GHz is pretty beefy I'd say. 😁

True, although I'm surprised how much faster clock for clock newer generations of chip are. My 1.8GHz ULV i5 Ivy Bridge in my MacBook Air hauls serious ass.

Not long ago I helped set up a computer class with 24 last generation i3's. My 2-year old i5-450M Notebook is much slower, my e6300 at home is ~2-2.5 times slower than my notebook, judging by 3Ds max rendering time. If low-end is so freaking fast, how exactly fast is the high-end?

Iris030380 wrote:

I had no idea how fast that q8300 actually is. If I took my i3 back to stock speeds (3.06ghz) I think the q8300 is probably on a par with it gaming wise, and most definitely faster than my i3 in multitasking and encoding. Seems he got a really good deal! 😁

Presuming I get any spare money around the holidays I plan to buy an i5-750 and drop it straight into my existing motherboard, selling my i3 for £30-£40 to go towards the cost. I will probably OC the i5 to around 3.8Ghz for stability. This will be the first quad core I have owned. But to be fair, there is nothing out there that this i3-540 @ 4.2Ghz can't handle. I am still GPU limited, and as every game released apart from indie scene are designed for the consoles, upgrading now just seems a total waste of money. I will probably get that i5 and then call it a day. The i5-750 when OC'ed is a fairly large amount faster than this i3-540, but that begs the question, why the hell spend money on a Sandybridge i7? They are insanely fast, and Dishonored runs just fine on any decent 2007 dual core PC. So ... whats the point? Benchmarking? You need more money than sense. Unless you're into video encoding in a big way it's just a total waste of money.

I remember 10-15 years ago, 12 months was a lifetime of improvement and change in the PC world. Not only hardware, but the quality of games/software improved in parallel. These days that's just not the case.

gaming is a weak spot for the q8300, at only 2.3GHz and with only 2MB l2 per die (that's lga 775, so you have FSB, memory controller on the northbridge...); I would expect the i3 540 to be much quicker for gaming, but about on par (maybe slightly slower) for multi threading

as for why would you buy an i7? for gaming is probably wasted money most of the time, that's why most hardcore gamers go with the i5 K.
but for rendering it's much faster thanks to hyper threading...

now dishonored is pretty easy on the hardware, try games like BF3 on MP with 64 players, or GTA 4, or something like Starcraft 2 when there is a huge number of units on the screen.... you will see that is quite easy to justify the need for a really fast quad core if you want high framerate.

things have changed a lot, I think, part of it is the importance of consoles for PC gaming nowadays, most games are multi platform... also games NEED to be compatible with hardware from 6 years ago to reach more buyers... I think the amount of money spent to develop games now is much higher,

RacoonRider wrote:

Not long ago I helped set up a computer class with 24 last generation i3's. My 2-year old i5-450M Notebook is much slower, my e6300 at home is ~2-2.5 times slower than my notebook, judging by 3Ds max rendering time. If low-end is so freaking fast, how exactly fast is the high-end?

well, the mobile i5 is also a dual core with HT, just like the i3... a high end CPU is massively faster for multi threading than any i3, but the difference for single-dual thread is not so amazing (well, as long as you don't really overclock the high end CPU)

in MT (for rendering) a new i3 is probably equivalent to a Q6700, for single thread... it's faster than the i7 990x.

I can't remember the exact figures but Sandy Bridge was approximately 20% faster on average than the Nehalem architecture (which itself was a fair bit quicker than the Core2 architecture) and Ivy Bridge was about 15-25% faster than Sandy Bridge again.

RichB93 wrote:

I can't remember the exact figures but Sandy Bridge was approximately 20% faster on average than the Nehalem architecture (which itself was a fair bit quicker than the Core2 architecture) and Ivy Bridge was about 15-25% faster than Sandy Bridge again.

I agree on the Sandy Bridge being 20% faster than Nehalem but Ivy Bridge was not anywhere near that much faster than Sandy Bridge. At best the results clock for clock only manage a meager 3-5% and in floating point it is slightly slower due to increased L1/L2 latency but less than by 1%. Last but not least Ivy Bridge doesn't overclock as well while the Xeon counterpart costs more to use in the long run for data centers due to the poor thermals. Cheap thermal compound vs what was used in Sandy Bridge. So Ivy Bridge isn't all peaches and cream that people have made it out to be. The difference in power consumption isn't that great enough for everyday consumers to base their choice around that alone. 77w vs 95w isn't much of a difference when the system builder can easily balance that out with more efficient parts such as using a Gold rated psu or a lower end card. For those that go high end power consumption isn't a bid deal at all. The only area that does care and will see benefit is the mobile and highly integrated builders.

Ahh, my mistake. The mobile chips are pretty special though. I find my Air to be powerful enough for most things and it has a TDP of 18w! I can use it all day without it even warming up, unless I decide to do some heavy work. The HD 4000 graphics will even play TF2 and it has QuickSync for hardware accelerated H.264 encoding which QuickTime and a few other apps seem to use!

SPBHM wrote:

as for why would you buy an i7? for gaming is probably wasted money most of the time

You should see the difference an i7 makes in a gaming rig with 3 or 4 video cards. Even with only 2 it makes a big difference.

Name me a game released post Crysis which needs more than my PC - a Dual Core 3 generations old bottom end CPU with a single video card. There are maybe a handful. An i7 with 4 GFX cards in SLI for GAMING? Pointless and a total waste of money.

Iris030380 wrote:

Name me a game released post Crysis which needs more than my PC - a Dual Core 3 generations old bottom end CPU with a single video card. There are maybe a handful. An i7 with 4 GFX cards in SLI for GAMING? Pointless and a total waste of money.

Sure, if you like playing with no FSAA or filtering, with your games set to medium detail.

And forget hi-res texture packs in Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout 3.

Let's not even mention multi-monitor gaming...

I'm of the mindset that, if finacially feasible, overkill is just the beginning. I can't think of a single game I'd care to play with multiple-monitors, except maybe flight sims, but that's an almost dead genre at the moment. I'd much prefer to be able to completely max out the detail and smoothness on a single larger screen than have to sacrifice quality over several.

That's one of the things I love about this hobby, at least with the older stuff, you can get that bonerific experience on the cheap when as a kid it was only a wet dream.

Well, there's no need to follow the trend and waste thousands just for gaming. That's what retro is for! 😉

Last time I went "high-end" was early 2010: i7-930/X58/GTX 470 x2. The i7-930 was worth it, esp. OC'd to 4GHz+ and the X58 platform is still quite relevant for a workstation spec even today, being capable to be maxed out to 48GB RAM--even if unofficially supported--when the RAM prices are so damn good these days.

The GTX 470s... not so great, maybe, I admit, especially with the 570/580 coming later that same year, but that's the point: if you aren't using the GPUs for other than gaming purposes, they're almost a total waste of money, indeed. Because as a VOGONers you know you can always get these toys a few years later for a much better deal. Just put what you want on a waiting list.

But if you happen to have the chance to use these damn powerful GPUs productively on a daily basis, e.g. working with unbiased raytrace rendering (Octane Render is getting even more awesome today), then yes, buying 4x 580 3GB cards or 4x 680 4GB cards are going to be worth it. (I'm not sure putting your machines up for SETI@home would be good enough of an excuse though...)

senrew wrote:

I'd much prefer to be able to completely max out the detail and smoothness on a single larger screen than have to sacrifice quality over several.

False dichotomy. If you have a balls-to-the-wall setup like sliderider describes, you can have both.

SquallStrife wrote:

senrew wrote:

I'd much prefer to be able to completely max out the detail and smoothness on a single larger screen than have to sacrifice quality over several.

False dichotomy. If you have a balls-to-the-wall setup like sliderider describes, you can have both.

That assumes I went out all enough to be able to support a setup like that. I should have defined "overkill" as "More than enough to maintain a balls-to-the-wall single screen max detail level over a longer period of time." Basically, future proofing the setup I aimed for.