Upgrade ideas from x79/3930k

[workmatic]

Hi All,

I thought I knew a fair bit about putting a PC together, but after half and hour reading all the insight in these forums are realized how far that is from the case. Anyway, I have been slowly upgrading my machine for a little while near, and am at the point where I realize I need some suggestions as to where to go.

I use my machine for gaming primarily, app development, and not uncommon to run several VM's.

This is what I have currently:

Asus Sabertooth X79 Motherboard
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming OC 11G Card (recent buy)
i7 3930K
G.Skill Ares F3-1600C10Q-32GAO 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3
Corsair HX-750 V2 80 PLUS Gold Power Supply
Asus PG279Q (recent buy)
Corsair Carbide 500R Case

I have no idea how I should understand power requirements. Like I am wondering whether my PSU which is old is still ok with the new 1080 graphics card? The system has been running fine for 3 or so weeks now.

I also realise maybe I have bottlenecks now because of the upgrade to 1080ti? Not exactly sure how to work that out/test.

With what I have currently, I guess if I want to upgrade from here it means new cpu/motherboard/memory. Which would be a good way to go to have something that will last for the next 3-5 years?

I appreciate any and all help I can get, and in the mean time will keep studying the threads in this forum. Very helpful everyone here it seems.

Thanks

 

[EarthDog]

You can look up how much power any gpu uses... yours is ~250w. Now, hard to say if you are using more or less as no idea what you were using before.

That said 750w is plenty including overclocking bkth cpu and gpu to their ambient limit.

You have two options to me... x299 and 7820x or ryzen 7 1800x and x370. The intel will be a bit faster all around from stock and overclock more if that is your thing. You will pay a slight premium for it, however.

 

[workmatic]

I would probably prefer to stick to intel. Thanks for the suggestion.
Can you tell me also provide any suggestions as far as cooling I should be looking at? Something like a Thermaltake Floe or NZXT Kraken ?
Also if I get something like that, is it the case they have thermal paste pre applied? So in that case i'd just get the CPU cradled in and connect the cooler on top and be sweet?

Applying the thermal paste last time was one of the most nervous experience's I've had. LOL.

 

[Kursah]

Tell us more about your storage, you make no mention of it, and that could be critical with development, database and VM work, and absolutely for gaming as well. Storage IO can be the biggest bottleneck ever in some workloads and process environments.

Are you running SSD's? Large SSD's? The IO even on SATA3 SSD's is pretty decent for many, toss a couple in a RAID setup and you can be screaming along...or you can get the PCI-e SSD's and go to the next level for storage I/O.

If your overall system, CPU, MB, and RAM still suffice for your needs and you don't feel the upgrade "itch" as a priority here, I'd focus on storage and backup solutions. Especially if you run a version of RAID with no redundancy or parity. I'd run a backup anyways, because you never know.

I can't imagine you'll have any huge bottlenecks with your platform and that GPU, maybe something minor...but if your performance is where you want it to be, I find it hard to tell you to spend $$$ on a new platform, CPU and RAM. Though the currently released stuff is also looking mighty fine, and if I had money again I'd probably be feeling the itch myself!

Applying thermal paste is a cakewalk after you've done it a few times. I prefer AC MX-4 and Noctua NH-T1 (iirc)...neither are conductive, which helps ease the nerves a bit and both are easy to apply.

I'd suggest only going water if you plan to overclock, but that's just a personal preference of mine and even then in my own PC's I usually go for air cooling. More because of early generation AIO's leaking frequently enough that I got to see on the bench I have a preconceived bias.

You might also look at AMD ThreadRipper to if you want something a little higher end from AMD that is more competitive and higher on core count. Honestly I find it nice to see AMD in a better spot to be competitive with Intel to the point we've seen noticeable changes in Intel's lineup in recent months.

 

[workmatic]

Apologies, I had a Samsung 840 series 250GB ssd which i just upgraded to Samsung 850 1TB ssd

other than that I have a Seagate Barracuda 3TB.

Considering purchasing an external NAS, which is interesting you mention those aspects, as perhaps that is a better place for me to focus my attention. I have just been browsing these forums and noticing all the changes in hardware over the 5 or 6 years since I originally put it together

I haven't over clocked in the past, mostly because I don't really know what I'm doing yet but i'd certainly be interested to try it, if I felt it was any need over to do over my hardware as stock. I am very nervous on temps. I need to check again under load and get a better idea of where I am at.

 

[Kursah]

Those are good SSD's, did you retire the 840 or repurpose it?

Do you rely on the 3TB drive to perform high IO for VM's, work and games or does that all reside on the 1TB SSD?

NAS units are a good way to go, I prefer to build my own out of home-grade PC gear I either have left over or pick up for cheap, then slap in a RAID card, run a RAID 1, 5, 6 or 10 array depending on drives, storage space required, and overall performance needs.

Though the NAS vendors out there have some great hardware, it depends on what all you plan to do with your NAS. If you simply want backup, you could use an old mITX or mATX setup, and run two large HDD's in RAID1

You could go with a full enterprise-grade deployment as well..it just depends on your budget, skillset, abilities, patience and motivation. Again, I prefer a small PC build, that can hold 2+ HDD's. I like to run some form of redundancy whether it is software or hardware RAID. And even then I'll also have that replicating backup images to USB HDD(s). Redundancy is key to maintaining your data. In most cases, home networks are 100Mbps to 1000Mbps, and saturating that is around 9MB/s on 100Mbps and close to 100MB/s on 1000Mbps, most modern hard drives can accomplish that in read and write over most of their programmed usable space.

The way I do things might not work for everyone here, but it works really well for me!

Building your own devices gives some perspective and also lets you learn and become more confident with each project. But if you want easy and turnkey, you might look at Synology, Qnap or similar.

 

[Aquinus]

If your machine is serving you well, I would let it be and see what comes out in the future. I just upgraded my 3820 to a 3930k and I feel like I'm good for at least another year or two aside from the amount of noise from fans and the power consumption. You seem to have your bases covered with respect to how your machine is built and with what you do with it so, I would enjoy it a little longer unless performance is becoming inadequate.

 

[yotano211]

Can you learn to overclock the processor, you can get some extra performace out of it. The 3930k is still a very good cpu

 

[eidairaman1]

Skt 2066 or SP3r2 are the only viable upgrade options going from skt 2011...

 

[Peter Lindgren]

Since you are using VMs you may want more cores.

This one works well with your motherboard. And you get PCIe 3.0.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-XEON...700430?hash=item25deea814e:g:9P0AAOSw9R1Zo9jb

This my 2680v2 running @3.5Ghz on all cores.