Questions about upgrading a 1155 CPU

Factual Questions
1

I want to upgrade to a more powerful and faster CPU (mostly for 3d rendering, video editing and perhaps gaming as a bonus), but without changing the motherboard, but since I don’t really know a lot about cpu’s, I’d like to see if I can get some of these cpu’s (list bellow) without having to change additional parts on my computer.

I currently have:

I have limited shekels, so after a extremely extensive search (I’m from Serbia, so my options are limited) I found a few used cpu’s, but from trusted sellers, so these are the highest performance ones from what I can afford::

  1. I5 3330 and 3350P

  2. i5 2500K

  3. I5 2400

  4. I3 3220

  5. I7 2600*

*i7 2600 is the only I7 that fits on my motherboard (per motherboard’s website) along with i7 2700 and i7 3770, so compatibility shouldn’t be an issue, but I didn’t get the price for this one yet, so it may easily go over my budget.

–

As I said, I plan on using the new cpu mostly for rendering, so performance is a must. So what would be the best deal from these and more importantly, will I have to change anything other about my PC for some of these to work?

Some of the CPU’s are being sold with cooling fans and some without it, the only other problem I could imagine is electricity supply. I used to have a old Athlon Sempron 140 and when I upgraded to a G1610 (55W), I had to buy a new electricity supply, my service guy bought that, so I don’t know what he was looking for when upgrading, so if I buy for example a 95W cpu now, what do I have to look out for?

2

I think you might get more bang for your buck (not to mention fewer problems and risks) by upgrading your graphics card. Having a graphics card with a powerful GPU and lots of memory, is what you want for rendering. Of course, the CPU may still be a bottleneck, a bit.

3

For rendering, CPU - particularly the number of cores - is usually king. Get yourself the i7-3770. Do note the warning at the bottom of that page to update the motherboard BIOS before installing a new CPU. You should make sure that your current CPU cooler can cope with an increased TDP.

4

Some rendering applications rely a lot on the GPU, but a lot of rendering software these days still relies on the CPU for the bulk of the heavy lifting. Find out which one (CPU or GPU) will give you the most bang for the buck with the specific rendering software that you are using.

Tom’s Hardware has some CPU benchmarks for some rendering programs, like 3dsMax for example. If your software isn’t listed you can at least compare with some other rendering programs just to get a comparison between the different CPUs you are looking at.

5

I can’t, I can only get the ones that I already listed, nothing else, I already checked every tech shop in my city and a Serbian version of Craigslist, so those are the only ones that fit my budget, nothing more, nothing less.

Also, I got the price for the I7 2600 and as expected, it’s also over my budget, so I am deciding between:

(all are I5 class)

  1. 3350P
  2. 3330
  3. 2500 (or 2500K)
  4. 2400

The first 2 are a little more expensive, but they are around 69-77W (which is closer to my current 55W G1610) and the 2500 and 2400 are cheaper, but they are 95W, so if I decided to buy them, what would I have to look out for?

@mangetout I bought a 2gb video card recently and they are really expensive, plus my current CPU is probably bottlenecking my GPU. For example when playing GTA V, I can set most settings to medium, some even to high and the video card usage stat on the top of the graphics options says that just half of gpu resources are needed for those settings, but my cpu is constantly around 90-99% while playing the game.

Also, I did a small test in Blender yesterday, I rendered a scene with both CPU and GPU and there wasn’t really a noticeable difference in time, so a new cpu would probably help, even if it doesn’t help with that, I still do a lot more video rendering and I think that the CPU is the main element for that.

6

You can afford the i7

eg

7

My understanding is encoding video (e.g. output h.264) is all CPU but doing things like 3D renders and other effects are GPU.

8

He’s trying to keep the same mobo.

9

Depends on how good you want it to look. To quote the latest user guide for one of the most powerful professional 3D rendering programs out there:

*Software rendering produces images of the highest quality, letting you achieve the most sophisticated results. *
*Computation occurs on the CPU, as opposed to hardware rendering, which relies on the machine’s graphics card. Because it is not restricted by the computer’s graphics card, software rendering generally is more flexible. The trade-off, however, is that software rendering is generally more time consuming. *

…
*Hardware rendering uses the computer’s video card and drivers installed on the machine to render images to disk. Hardware rendering is generally faster than software rendering, but typically produces images of lower quality compared to software rendering. In some cases, however, hardware rendering can produce results good enough for broadcast delivery. *
Hardware rendering cannot produce some of the most sophisticated effects, such as some advanced shadows, reflections, and post-process effects. To produce these kind of effects, you must use software rendering.

10

Peeeople, I am not asking whether there’s another cpu out there or whether I need a cpu or gpu, as I said I do a lot more video encoding than 3d modeling (I make videos at least every week) and I currently have a very weak cpu for my needs (just 2500 passmark points) , so I absolutely need a new cpu anyway. I’m only asking whether I will need to update other components (PSU and fan) as well or not, once I buy either a 3350P, 2500K or something like that. :slight_smile:

I probably made a mistake by not giving more details about my power supply and my fan, so I took two pictures of them, maybe someone understands these numbers better.

The power supply

https://s20.postimg.org/vio5k59vh/20170826_184623.jpg

The fan (I don’t have the box for it, so this is all info on it that I can find)

https://s20.postimg.org/del4zic71/20170826_184652.jpg

As for the power supply, I wrote in the first post the names of other hardware I have and as for the CPU, as I said it is a G1610, 55W, 2 cores, 2 threads and since my first choice would probably be the I5 3350P, here’s a comparison on CPU boss for those two, there’s maybe some important info I didn’t mention about my cpu http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3350P-vs-Intel-Celeron-G1610

11

In theory your power supply has more than enough wattage. In practice, who knows, it looks to me like what you would call a “gutless wonder” type power supply that is super overrated. A good quality 350 watt PSU (such as a Seasonic brand) can run your 7700 and an i5 no problem. But you probably can use your existing PSU.
Your fan is almost certainly the Stock cooler from the Celeron given the intel branding. Intel CPUs will throttle if they overheat so it will work/not actually kill your new CPU, but you surely won’t get all the performance you are paying for. Something like a Cooler Master hyper 212 evo is about the level of cooling you want for an i5 or i7 so that it never throttles even under extended 100% load.
You are picking between some parts that I have personally run and handed down or sold since. I personally would go with an I5-2500k since if that isn’t enough, you can upgrade to a Z77 motherboard and get another 30-40% out of it by overclocking later. (Edit to add - your H61 probably can’t overclock it much/at all, you generally need a Z series mobo for that).
I’d actually say your CPU and GPU are pretty balanced right now, so I wouldn’t expect miracles in Video games (unless you are running at less than 1920x1080) - mostly I’d just expect the bottleneck to now be in the GPU 100% of the time. Most video rendering will get much much faster though.

12

Are you buying a “tray” CPU or a retail boxed one? Because if boxed, it will come with it’s own heat sink and fan, so you won’t have to worry about that.

13

As mentioned above the CPU will throttle (slow down) if it overheats and it won’t damage the CPU.

Therefore you can safely run your old cooler.

Just monitor the CPU temp and look up the Intel max temp spec to see if you’re running into an overheat situation. If it overheats you can look into a better CPU cooler.

14

Thanks for the answers. :slight_smile: I am going to buy a used cpu and some of them sell with fans and some without fans, so that’s one of the reasons why I started the thread, I wanted to know how big of a factor that is, but I just found this on the internet, all of these are Sandy bridge generation:

Core i3-2100 idle 30 to 37°C normal temp 50 to 62°C max temp 69°C

Core i5-2500K idle 35 to 41°C normal temp 55 to 65°C max temp 72°C

Core i7-2600K idle 32 to 40°C normal temp 47 to 60°C max temp 72°C

The slightly newer generation Ivy Bridges are 2 or 3 celsiuses lower ( CPU Temperature - What are the Normal and Maximum CPU Temps? ) , but apparently there’s not that big of a difference even between a smaller i3 class and the i7 beast class, so it seems that fans shouldn’t be a problem.

I couldn’t find temp data for my cpu or anything similar to it, but I did find that it’s max operating temperature is 105 Celsiuses ( http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/81/Intel_Celeron_Dual-Core_G1610_vs_Intel_Celeron_Dual-Core_G550.html ), which, if true, means that I probably have a good enough fan, since it’s the one that came with the G1610 in a box. If it’s not, I can always get one later relatively cheap, also I don’t plan on overclocking.

So, since PSU and fans are solved, now I narrowed down the list of finalists:

3450
3350P (or 3330, I’ll talk about these two as one)
2500 (or 2500K, same as above)

3450 is the most pricey of these, but it also has the highest passmark score, 6,478. Ivy Bridge, 77W.

3350P or 3330 is my second choice, both have a passmark at around 6000 and like the 3450, both are the slightly newer Ivy Bridge generation, which means that their TDP is a little lower, around 75W.

2500 and 2500K, cheapest ones, they have a nice passmark that is inbetween the previous two, around 6200-6400. The problem here is that they are Sandy Bridge type and while my mobo supports them, they are both 95W and also don’t support 1600mhz RAM like the other ones.

So does it all come up to personal taste or is there any really decisive factor that makes some of these far better/worse than others?

15

Skip the 2xxx (Sandy Bridge) series as it doesn’t support USB 3.0. Get the 3xxx series Ivy Bridge)

16

I have a 2600K on an Gigabyte MoBo with USB 3.0, and it works just fine.

17

You are correct and my mistake. Turned out that not all do.

18

If you’re using Blender, note that GPU acceleration is far more likely to work when using CUDA cores from Nvidia rather than AMD hardware. That might be why you haven’t noticed much of a difference between CPU and GPU rendering performance.

19

I actually realized where I screwed up, you have to set the gpu rendering for Blender in 2 places, the user preferences and the rendering tab, I first only set it on the rendering tab and it ignored that setting, but now the gpu rendering works fine.

But regardless I still need a new CPU for everything else, I think that I’m going to go with 2400, mostly due to the price. There’s one 2400 with a fan included in the price and it’s pretty cheap, the 2500K costs some 30, 40 euros more and since I can’t overclock on my mobo (and wouldn’t do it if I could), by buying a 2500K I would basically get a 2500 and there’s almost no difference between 2400 and 2500, so…yeah, I can save a lot of money and not have to worry about the fan. :slight_smile: