Discussed to Death I know.....sorry
 

Dear CFD Members,

Im sorry to bring this up yet again, as from the posts I have read so far, this is commonly asked.

so, Dare I ask......Gulp :eek:

I'm looking to update my old tiring machine (currently a Q6600 Quad 2.4Ghz on a asus p5k-e board with 8Gb ocz reaper 1066mhz)

I dont have thousands to spend, so looking for some consumer level suggestions on CPU, Board, Mem, GPU.

Budgets I guess in the region of, CPU - £150, Board - £100-£150.

Thanks in advance for any help

Yeah ... I've still got one exactly like that, and you can't do a top notch upgrade for that amount of money. But if you can scrape together enough for either a Core i5 or an AMD FX8150, you will more than double the performance. From the testing I've done, the key to good CFD performance is to get the very best overclockable DDR3 RAM, then find a motherboard/CPU combo that will support it. In other words, budget for the new RAM first, then figure out how to fit the board and CPU into whatever's left.

Thanks for the replay

I should of also mention that I will be running more thermal analysis, like natural and force convection sinks, enclosures, PCB assemblies, etc.

Will probably dabble in some aerodynamics as a hobby now and then, but I wont ever be reaching the crazy number of mesh cells.

What Mem is recommended these days then? I can actually get Mem pretty cheap, it all the other components I have to pay standard pricing for :(

You can get up to DDR3-2133 from suppliers like Crucial and Kingston. The thing to be aware of is that 2133 is not AFAIK an officially supported speed, so you need to check that your board and CPU combination support that speed.

I think I will save up some more pennies for the i7 if thats the best bet??

But then, would the Quad Core Xeon E5506 2.13GHz LGA1366 4.80GT/sec 4MB be better? As this is only £179

No, I reckon you would be better off with the i7. The nice thing about the i7 is that it has 4 parallel memory channels, so it can really feed the cores with data. The LGA1366 stuff is outdated now. Downside of the i7 is that the boards are quite expensive, because of the complexity of the additional memory connections.

Only the Sandy Bridge-E i7s (i7-3930K, 3960X, 3820) are quad channel memory, 3820 is the cheapest/best value. The regular sandy bridge and ivy bridge are only dual channel, but like CapSizer says, they would still be faster than the old Xeons.

I notice the i7-3820 is not to badly priced (as you say), would this be the best choice for me (and my budget) if it has qaud memory channel

Also noticed the i7-3820 only supports up to DDR3-1600, does that mean I get a board capable of say 2400, then the CPU wont run with 2400 memory.

There are a couple of board that support the i7-3820 and 2000+ memory, such as

Asus P9X79
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3
Asrock X79 EXTREME9 X79
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
Asus SABERTOOTH X79

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I have bumped my budget up a little to £800 ish (to include CPU, Memory, Board, HDD, and Graphics (unless I keep my quadro fx1400, but its getting old now!!)

Hi All,

This is what Im thinking, please let me know your comments

CPU
i7-3820

Motherboard
ASrock X79 Extreame
or
Asus P9X79
or
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5

Memory
Corsair 1866 Mhz Vengence
or
Kingston 2133 Mhz Predator XMP


Cooling:
Intel LGA2011 Liquid Cooling RTS2011LC

Case:
Coolermaster CM690 II
or
Antec All Black 300

PSU:
Not decided, something for around £90



Although, I am questioning the Motherboard of the above, as they seem to do a much cheaper version which is almost the same. other than different PCI slots
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...e-30-(x16)-atx

anyone have any comments on this??

anyone willing to help?

Well, there is not really a huge amount more to say about that lot. Your choice of CPU is a cost-effective way of getting a system that will run with 4 memeory channels, and the faster memory is most likely the better option. It's unlikely that anybody around here has specific experience of the other components that you have chosen. Liquid cooling is certainly a good idea in my experience. Both Asus and Gigabyte make good motherboards, pick the one that has the features that you need. Case, PSU .... dunno, the ones I've bought have all worked OK. And my latest case has blue LED's ... yippee

Russh - could you give us an update on how your upgrade went - what did you choose in the end, and how did it work out?