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Hi all,

here is my old rig:

CPU: Q9450
MB: Asus P5KPL-G31
ram: 2x2Gb
VGA: ATI 4870 512mb
PSU: Tagan 500 (12V1: 18A; 12V2: 18A)
monitor res: 2048x1152

I usually gaming, sometime work with CAD, 3D modeling and rendering on sketchup and 3ds Max
just recently upgrade from 4870 to Gigabyte 6950 1Gb for better FPS.

My question is that, i wonder if there is a bottleneck on CPU. Do i need an upgrade?
if so, which would be best? i got budget around 500$.

Thank in advance for any recommendation.

honoradept wrote:

Hi all,

here is my old rig:

CPU: Q9450
MB: Asus P5KPL-G31
ram: 2x2Gb
VGA: ATI 4870 512mb
PSU: Tagan 500 (12V1: 18A; 12V2: 18A)
monitor res: 2048x1152

I usually gaming, sometime work with CAD, 3D modeling and rendering on sketchup and 3ds Max
just recently upgrade from 4870 to Gigabyte 6950 1Gb for better FPS.

My question is that, i wonder if there is a bottleneck on CPU. Do i need an upgrade?
if so, which would be best? i got budget around 500$.

Thank in advance for any recommendation.

CAD ha? 3d modeling.....i'm no expert of those fields but aren't they more taxing on the video card these days?
If not and you do need a better CPU, Ivy Bridge is just around the corner. Wait it out for a month or so. At the very least they will drop prices for SB to clear stocks. Best case scenario Ivy Brdige CPUs offer you some great SKUs with reasonable pricing. But if you do upgrade do you also need new RAM? What do you got now?

I'll wait for flip-mode, just brew it! and others more familiar with CAD / 3D modeling software to provide more input, but I would think upgrading to more RAM and an SSD would help more than upgrading the CPU. Also, in agreement with Arclight's comment to wait for Ivy Bridge if you can.

The Q9450 is considerably slower for rendering and other high-utilization activities than an i5 2500K. Integer was right that you may find yourself RAM-constrained (especially with big models/scenes). Here's the Q9450 vs 2600K (the 2500K is much more of a bang-for-your-buck improvement).

i5 2500K - $225 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115072
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 - $122 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 13-157-271
One of the numerous 1.5 V CAS 9 DDR 1600 2x4GB kits.

Around $390 shipped.

I am partial to Muskin because they've treated me well historically but any of those RAM kits should work. If you need the absolute-cheapest components you can get 1333 RAM. Here's an article from Jared Bell about how memory affects the Sandy Bridge platform — lss, it doesn't have much of an effect at all. However, since 1600 is always within 5% of 1333 on price, you might as well get the slightly-quicker stuff. Literally $2-5 difference.

I got 16GB of RAM working easily on that mobo, and you might just buy a pre-tested 4x4GB kit if you want 16GB from the start.

If you need internal USB 3.0 I'd get the ASUS P8Z68-V LE for $138. You'll need to play with voltages if you want 4 DIMMs on that board, though.

Do you live Near a Microcenter?? 2500Kis 179$ And50-60$ off select 1155 motherboards.
I do not recall but it was over 100bucks cheaper then newwgg

Ivy Bridge isn't due out for several more months. June was the rumored launch date last I heard.

A $100 Phenom II X4 955 would be faster than the OP's current CPU probably in rendering tasks and you can overclock slightly to improve it further. My brother's got a Core i7 920 which is faster than the Core 2 Quad clock for clock and my slightly overclocked P2 X4 kept up with it in the last recent batch of X79 $300 CPU benchmarks I saw. I'd wait and go for Ivy Bridge in a few months if I had ample upgrade money.

Also, check out the X79 Sandy Bridge-E (it's late and I'm lazy) to see if the extra memory bandwidth benefits the OP's applications.

If you need it now you won't regret a 2500K, but if you are alright with your current PC for a few months I'd probably wait, too.

SB-E will be outside your budget unless you can find a mega-huge deal (looking at $500 just for CPU + mobo, and you'd need new RAM, too).

The main upgrade in ivy bridge compared to sandy bridge is the IGP,that will probably be 50+% better then SB.Besides a smaller node and lower power draw, 77watts vs 95 watts...opps forgot native USB3 and PCIe3 in which the latter really wont matter for a while since we cannot saturate PCIe 2.0 with any GPU.
From what i have been reading CPU performance gain with IVY vs Sandy will range from 5% to perhaps 20% on new instruction sets on very specific apps.
If u can get a good deal on a 2500k,2550k,2600-700k i feel its worth getting now and not waiting.Just make sure you get a IVy bridge compatible motherboard,so down the road if they ever make a 6 core 1155 or ivy will run at 5.7 ghz on 1.3 volts you can pop one in then use the sandy cpu for cheap badazz htpc or secondary/friend gaming rig.
Never noticed intel dropping prices on cpus much at all with the release of a new cpu,they might drop the price 10%

evilpaul wrote:

Ivy Bridge isn't due out for several more months. June was the rumored launch date last I heard.

Ivy Bridge desktop CPUs should arrive by April.

The short answer to the question of whether or not the Q9450 is a bottleneck to the system is, yes. But there's nothing inherently bad about that; every system has a bottleneck and if you remove the Q9450 bottleneck then it will just be some other component that's the bottleneck, right?

If the question is whether or not the Q9450 is a bottleneck to the HD 6950 in gaming scenarios, well, it probably is a little bit of one, but at HD resolutions and higher image quality settings it's probably not very much of a bottleneck. Of course a faster CPU would be faster, but I don't think a Q9450 is inadequate for gaming yet.

As for CAD, that's largely CPU / RAM dependent and doesn't tax the video card much. There are scenarios where it does and there are specific CAD programs that need a more nuanced discussion regarding the video card (Solidworks, maybe some others), but generally a low powered video card works just as well as a high powered video card. A HD 5670 1GB won't feel any different than a HD 6950, typically. In terms of RAM, 8 GB should be enough for the vast majority of situations. Even here at work we've got a couple people going on less but the most demanding users seem to get by fine with 8 GB (although with RAM prices where they are I'm putting 16 GB in new machines).

As for rendering, the most important thing is to have as many cores as possible. You've got a quad core so that's good. You can make a rough guess about how your CPU compares in rendering from right here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/21987/13 and my guess is that a i5 2500 is about 75% faster than a Q9450.

You're Q9450 is still a very capable processor and it's not going to hurt you to sit on it for a little while longer - unless you're pumping out CAD renderings for money. If it's overclocked then you're in even better shape. A Q9450 should be very close in performance to my X4 955 and I plan on sitting on that for a while longer, for what it's worth.

Lastly, it's never a mistake to purchase an i5 2500 K, unless it's really close to the 3670 K launch and you can manage to wait.

Wait a couple of months for Ivy Bridge if you can.

If you need more memory for CAD, why stop at 4x4 GiB?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148545
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820233232

You'll need Windows 7 64-bit Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate to use more than 16 GiB of memory.

honoradept wrote:

rendering on sketchup

Side topic. What do you use to render sketchup? Export to 3dsmax? Apparently Sketchup has a POV Ray plugin but I haven't checked it out yet.