2014-03-12, 03:22 AM
Derosis Wrote:I forgot to mention the case was going to be set up at Half the price, as I got a good deal for it at a local store. Again, I appreciate it, and if you got any update recommendations do let me know. I have a minimum of $500 USD. But, yeah, poor purchasing decisions on my part.
understandable for the case at least. as long as you arent paying 80+ for that case, then it should be alot better.
essentially how I like to look at upgrade platforms, you generally have 2 options:
Most performance per $ vs Upgrade room
for instance, with the Mobo + CPU you picked i'll explain it a bit.
the i5-3300P is a lower end i5 quad core. in general, intel locks out overclocking on all CPUs except ones labeled K or X. in this case, P is generally designed for slightly lower wattage use. an i5 quad is still a solid price/perf component.
with the z77 extreme 4, its an lga 1155(sandy/ivy bridge) motherboard with full motherboard capabilities which generally include overclocking processors. if you dont plan to ever upgrade the i5-3300P to an i5-3570k or an i7-3770k(as lga 1155 is dead atm, no more new processors will be made for it) the overclocking function of the board will never be used by you, and all it will be is resell value. This of course would be the "upgrade path" option.
essentially at a price/perf corner, you have 2 options. keep the i5-p and switch the motherboard to a cheaper h61(bare bone motherboard with basic functions), h67(slightly upscale) and z68 for sandy bridge stuff. but these are slightly outdated and I would recommend either b75(was originally designed for business, its closer to h61 I guess, but for ivy bridge), h77(ivy bridge equivalent to h67) or z75(barebone version of a z77) to cut costs a bit.
though only make that decision on the base of one thing. is that really low end boards only support 16x/4x crossfire(slightly less performance than 8x/8x crossfire) and only make that decision if you plan to crossfire.(I'm only assuming the possibility due to 750w PSU) so in the end:
Price/Performance: low end i5 + low end ivy bridge mobo + SSD/Any computer upgrade(i actually upgraded my comp with SSD recently,. I now get the feeling of "Once you go black, you never come back"
Upgradability: any ivy/sandy bridge processor + medium/higher end mobo. this will allow you to be slightly more open about maximizing performance on a platform you do not want to change much. though, its not cost effective as the money spent on cooling performance, the K processor and a better mobo could be used for something else in your situation.
another question is, is there a reason why you would prefer to use the sandy/ivy bridge platform(LGA 1155) rather than the newer Haswell based platform(LGA 1150)?
power consumption should be lower on non overclocked processors, as well as if you ever get interested in emulation(e.g Dolphin Emulation playing Smash) haswell gets significant performance gains vs sandy/ivy. else, haswell is marginally a 5% slight performance gain compared to sandy/ivy.