I plan plan making this new build, heres the specs GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3L Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB sapphire 4870 corsair 550vx PSU Noctua 120mm cpu cooler 500gb WD Lg cd/dvd and a coolermaster haf-932 I was wondering would upgrading to a i7 920 be worth ALL the extra money because its alot of money. Ill have to upgrade the motherboard Cpu and RAM for it to work properly... thanks
If you're really into encoding, then no doubt the i7 will be for you, but for all else your build is excellent. Plus, i7 builds are scary expensive!!
On that budget, not really. An i7 system more compares to someone using a higher end board and, for instance a Q9550. The i7 isn't much more use for games unless you use at least two graphics cards. . It's forte is video editing. Fortunately i7 builds are much cheaper than they used to be. Nice build though. A lot of power off that 550W VX though. No problem, but it might get a bit noisy.
I noticed even on my OC Q6600/4870 I think i'm starting to hit my max power consumption with my 550VX. It might have been from unstable OC settings but it was at the point that if I bumped my desk my PC would reboot until i turned my OC down a bit. If you're planning on OC your components it wouldn't hurt to pick up the 650HX instead. As for the 4870 I'd recommend getting the 1GB version of it if you end up going with the i7. With a monster CPU like that you'll likely want to throw in another 4870 down the road.
You've got a faulty component or your overclock isn't configured right then. 550W Corsair PSUs can power a hell of a lot more than that.
Good to hear. I recently moved my PC from under the desk to the top of the desk and only started to notice how the PSU fan stays on for a couple minutes after the machine is turned off. That coupled with the recent issue had me worried. It didn't seem right to top out at 3.0 Ghz
That usually indicates heat, but I didn't know VX units did that, or any Corsair unit for that matter, unless the PSU is getting really hot. Regardless, what settings have you used to get to 3Ghz?
Everything but the FSB is running stock. 333x9, ram is running 5:4, ram is running 5:4, CPU voltage is 1.3 with CPU-Z reporting actual around 1.26. No other voltages have even been touched. Was running it at 350x9 but that starting give me problems after it being fine for a couple weeks. Of course this was without any stress testing.
I believe at the time I was trying for 3.2Ghz and couldn't get it to stick no matter the voltage on the CPU. I'm just trying to remember why I turned the voltage back to stock when taking it down to 3.15 instead of the 3.0 I had it on before. Oh well, the brain farts you have when doing many things at once.
I didn't have an ideal setup for overclocking when I had my Q6600 as I was using 4 sticks of RAM, but I found 1.45V was enough to get me to 3.24Ghz well enough, 3.42 would boot into windows ad 3dmark but not be 24/7 stable.
A bit off topic, but I heard that you can crossfire a 4830 and a 4870. I happen to have both in for 2 seperate computers but if I were to crossfire would it really boost my framerates at all? Im thinking the 4830 would just bottleneck the 4870 and there would be a tiny speed boost, kinda like DDR2 1066 with DDR2 667...
It would boost the performance yes, but the lack of PCIe bandwidth will cause an issue in some games (though some are completely unaffected as I found to my surprise). Additionally, the performance boost will be closer to that of two HD4830s, rather than the 'mean performance' of the two cards, which in this case would be two HD4850s. A 4870+4830 combination will work and be better than two HD4830s, but not so much better that it's worth buying a better card unless you find one very cheap. Also be advised 4830+4870 requires THREE 6-pin PCIe connectors. Two 4830s or a 4830+4850 setup only require the two a 550W PSU should have.
