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All,
I'm rocking the 2500k SB in my main desktop, but on a P67 chipset from back in the day (I was broke-ish).

Is it worth side-grading my ASRock P67 Pro3 to a ASRock Z75 Pro3/ASRock Z77 Extreme4?

Or, do we think that Skylake will bring enough improvement to the gaming CPU world that i should save my cash for a brand new Mobo + CPU + DDR4 combo?

Cheers,

Sputnik

What would the sidegrade get you? USB3? More SATA 6gb/s ports? Better overclocking? If there's not much to be gained, you may as well stick with what you already have, either way.

I upgraded from an Asus P67 board to an Asrock Z77 Extreme4-M only because my Asus board failed.

It made no difference whatsoever. I wasn't expecting it to make any difference. The only thing you gain is native USB3 ports, and they're only of any value at all if you're having problems with the existing Etron EJ168A on your P67 board.

USB2 seems to be more like 25MB/s in my experience. Personally, I stuck a USB3 PCIe card in my Q67-based machine (Syba/Renesas controller), plugged the USB3 hub I have on the desk into it, and called it a day. Probably not quite as good as chipset support (PCIe x1 2.0 does 500MB/s, for one, and USB3.0 seems to do around 300MB/s as it is), but good enough. Quite nice for thumb drives and hard drive backups.

The P67 board only has 2 SATA 6gb/s ports, and one is shared with the eSATA port.

I have an external hard drive dock that can do eSATA, and 2 SSDs that take up both SATA ports.

Extra SATA 6gb ports will free up the eSATA ports for external hard drive(s) and docks.

Well, you could spend $125 on a replacement board or$15 on an add-in card to give you extra SATA3 ports. Hell, spend $25 and get an upmarket fancy one!

localhostrulez wrote:

USB2 seems to be more like 25MB/s in my experience.

Yeah, it's 10 bits per byte encoding at 480Mbps, so 48MB/s theoretical maximum, but I've never seen more than 41MB/s. The USB-to-SATA controller in your drive, the operating system, the drivers, the file system type and of course the USB3 controller on your board/card all have their overhead. For some reason 37MB/s sticks in my mind as the peak speeds for Intel's USB2 controller on Windows 7 doing sequential transfers.

Sputnik7 wrote:

I'm rocking the 2500k SB...
Is it worth side-grading my ASRock P67 Pro3 to a ASRock Z75 Pro3/ASRock Z77 Extreme4?
Should save my cash for a brand new Z107 Mobo + Skylake CPU + DDR4 combo?

Don't bother spending money on another LGA1155 motherboard.
If you're feeling that your Sandy Bridge CPU is a bit pokey, have you tried overclocking it? If you still want to upgrade, then definitely wait for Skylake. August isn't that far away.

If you want more SATA ports, there are solutions available.
PCIe 2.0 x4 4 ports Marvell 88SE9230
PCIe 2.0 x2 4 ports Marvell 88SE9230
PCIe 2.0 x2 4 ports Marvell 88SE9235
PCIe 2.0 x1 4 ports Marvell 88SE9215

JustAnEngineer wrote:

If you're feeling that your Sandy Bridge is a bit pokey, have you tried overclocking it? If you still want to upgrade, then definitely wait for Skylake. August isn't that far away.

Judging by the link he has in his sig it looks like he's already at 4.5GHz. I'd say: Wait for Skylake, read TR's reviews carefully, then think about these things:
1. Do I want to upgrade at all.
2. Do I want to upgrade to a better GPU while leaving the CPU as-is? If not GPU, how about an SSD?

Skylake will definitely be faster (even without an OC), but he might want to think about an alternative if there is a better upgrade for whatever workloads he uses.

Where'd eSATA go anyway? I saw it for a few years ago (my desktop specifically has a SATA port on the motherboard, labeled for eSATA use), but I haven't seen it much on anything new. Personally, USB3 seems to be enough for external drives - hell, I cloned an SSD earlier (one on USB3 bridge, one internal/SATA), and averaged 20GB/min (yeah, the tool I was using does those units). Aka ~340MB/s. Still half of what they claim, but good enough for an external drive.

Oh, and since JAE was posting links to Syba cards - I'll note that my USB3 card is a Syba PCIe x1 card (as I mentioned above), which works fine, although the molex power connector on it was a bitch. I put the card in the machine, tried to put the power connector in, and had to take it back out and really force the included sata/molex adapter in there. Yes, it was in the right direction, and it all works fine now that I have it in there, but really?

Thanks for the feedback!