Yeah, from my experience with this current PC (2009 build) is that the most important thing I get for a PC is the motherboard. I’m going to need that thing to survive a long time hopefully, so no crappy capacitors that are going to pop please.
Yakattack wins. Holy moly, pre-Ryzen (even Zen 1) AMD is easily the most overdue for an upgrade. Unless you were still somehow rocking a Core2 chip (and I kinda hate to admit it, but I actually do still use a MacBook Pro with a Core2Duo for distance learning during Corona).
Yes, just massive performance gains in the 7 years since Haswell released.
So I’m currently running a i7-6700k overclocked alongside a 2080 Ti and 32 GB of RAM. It appears that my motherboard will only support up to a 7700k because of a revision to the 1151 slot. This means I’m looking at a new motherboard and CPU. My questions:
- How annoying is Windows 10 about a motherboard swap these days? Probably some sort of repair-boot to fix drivers that are different and re-activation?
- Has RAM changed standards again since 4 years ago? Or will I be able to keep my RAM?
- Anything else I have to be concerned about a mobo swap? Haven’t done this in awhile. Running an NVMe drive, standard hard drives, and everything else is pretty much run of the mill (onboard sound, etc)
I generally am Intel only for the most part, so looking for recommendations. Current motherboard is a Gigabyte.
My backup computer is a Core2Duo.
I could replace my PC with an i5 or i7 machine sans graphics card for a few hundred dollars depending on the CPU generation. I can’t say it’s urgently needed (I have enough RAM to run a VM and play a game at the same time if I wanted to) though it would be nice.
Mine is paired with a 2500k. Still going strong, though planning a new build for the Fall (originally spring )
I tried playing with a SFF PC built off my old C2D E6600 about six years ago, and it was horribly pokey then. The experiment did not last long.
Did exactly that for a client this monday, went from i5-6th gen and B150 motherboard to i7-9700 and H370. Kept the same RAM, GPU and drives (Sata SSD and HDD).
Windows loaded up just fine and only had to make sure to install the new chipset drivers from the Gigabyte website. Possibly Windows could have done that itself through the Windows Update, but I didn’t bother waiting.
No clue regarding activation, probably you’d have to call MS.
I’m not too worried about the Windows activation - that’s generally easy to fix. Thanks for the rest of the info! Need to do some pricing.
On the other hand, I upgraded across a similar number of generations a couple of years ago, windows choked on audio drivers, and some ill advised troubleshooting steps in the registry eventually lead me to having to reinstall from scratch.
Whereupon I realized how utter my transition to cloud services has become, because there is a ton of stuff in my old Program Files folder I’m never gonna bother reinstalling…
Pulled the trigger on a Z490 motherboard and an I7-10700k to replace my 6700k. Will report back how the upgrade goes when it arrives. Also if anyone hasn’t shopped for Z490 boards, be aware they are on average $100 more than prior gen 1151 boards.
Upgrade was pretty easy - only thing that I had to futz with a little is re-activating Windows. Haven’t delved into overclocking yet, and apparently that’s a more complicated topic these days (lots of articles about Z490 motherboards running CPUs too hot by default because of settings, etc)
Does anyone overclock in this day and age? I thought all the dynamic management stuff did enough of that without user intervention.
You can’t really overclock Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. They are unlocked but there’s not much to be gained because they aggressively clock up to whatever your power and thermal limits can sustain on their own. Intel CPUs can still be gainfully overclocked, but nobody should be buying an Intel CPU right now.
And now they use a special aloy too:
I don’t necessarily disagree. But six days ago, Tom’s Hardware designated the new Intel Core i5-10600K as the #1 gaming CPU:
Tom’s has suckled balls for over a decade. But yeah, clockspeed means intel is still faster for lightly-threaded tasks. I still wouldn’t buy one.
Yeah, getting 400 FPS instead of 370 FPS in a 12 year old game is not a reason to tie yourself to the Intel platform.
I’m running my 8700k at around 4.8ghz using the Gigabyte auto-OC option.