Thread: advice on cpu upgrade

Originally Posted by phantomotap

On my server, see above, encoding a rendered scene (tens of thousands of rendered stills) for public consumption is "IO" bound.

So, yeah, it really does depend on what you are doing; the point though is that the upgrade from standard mechanical drives is generally a solid win.

Soma

Originally Posted by CornedBee

SSDs are awesome. Sub-10-second boots, nearly instantaneous launch of many programs, and massively accelerated compilation. It's the perfect thing for a programmer.

On both points, agreed. But if you have a limited budget and are forced to choose between these two, then it clearly becomes a weighted choice.
Just don't blindly rush out to buy an SSD over a CPU upgrade.
(But if you have the money, get both.)

Originally Posted by Elysia

Just don't blindly rush out to buy an SSD over a CPU upgrade.
(But if you have the money, get both.)

I *almost* bought an SSD in my recent upgrade, but the shopkeeper 'forced' a ~ 170 USD (if I'm converting correctly, assume +/- 10, if not) SMPS on me.
That turned out to be a very good buy, though.
(I found out later that the cheap ones wouldn't have been able to handle my GTX 550ti AND the new CPU together.)

Somewhat relevant to the thread, the CPU I got is an AMD FX-8120...which is easily the best I could find at the price I was willing to spend for the CPU and my general usage of a computer (doing lots of stuff at once(scoff all you want, at this), quite a bit of compiling..etc).
I had a doubt about the power usage, but it turned out to be fine when I saw that my OS scales down the frequency to 1400mhz (from 3.1 ghz) when not running anything too demanding.

P.S: 16 gigs of RAM feels awesome !

Just don't blindly rush out to buy an SSD over a CPU upgrade.

This is a true thing to say, but no one suggested that anyone do anything of the sort. That would be crazy. The video card, memory, and even monitor are all valid upgrade paths.

16 gigs of RAM feels awesome !

O_o

It feels awesome? What exactly have you been doing with your memory?

Soma

Originally Posted by phantomotap

It feels awesome? What exactly have you been doing with your memory?

Torturing it, mainly.
Other than some delay in startup/shutdown (syncing with hdd, by handmade scripts), that step has made *everything* noticeably faster, after using it creatively.

Well thanks for the input folks! Yes I might hold off for a bit at least. So far as the SSD, yes I agree with the general consensus that that was one of the best upgrades I've ever made, and I recommend it to everyone I talk to. It drives the prices down and moves us along further in the transition, it's ~1USD/gb!

PS, agree with the torture part. It's quite easy to peg the CPU + memory in comp. ling! The more resources you throw at it the better!