Upgrading From Intel P55 w/ Lynnfield to Intel Z68 w/ Sandy Bridge

The big question is was it worth it to move from the last generation Intel Core i7-870 processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 video card to the current generation Intel Core i7-2600K CPU and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 GPU. We found the answer as in most things is, it depends. If you are doing a lot of media encoding and heavy Photoshop work then it would definitely be worth the upgrade. We saw great improvements and we were not even using Quick Sync or CUDA which could have really dropped the hammer on the numbers. For gaming we would say that an entire system upgrade was OK but not a great improvement. We would suggest just upgrading the video card and hold on for another year to see what is around the next corner unless your system is missing features such as USB 3.0 and SATA III 6Gbps.

Moving from a P55 to a Z68 architecture was all about taking advantage of what Sandy Bridge brought to the table and in the areas that Intel highlighted it came through. We saw great improvement in video performance and other encoding tasks all with lower power consumption. While the PCI-E Gen 3 is still a bit dubious it is nice to know it is there if we find we can take advantage of it in the future. The integrated graphics are nice but if your going to pay for a motherboard in the price range of the Z68A-GD80 you are probably going to run a dedicated GPU leaving only possibly Quick Sync as a value.

One of the largest improvements we noticed is also one of the more expensive and that is the transition to a decent SATA III SSD drive. The boot times are amazing and everything is very snappy on our new system. Basically doubling the read speed over our mechanical WD Black drive means very little down time waiting on anything. We cannot wait for the day that Terabyte SSD’s are abundant at a price point near where traditional HDD are today. The other transfer improvement of USB 3.0 is also a significant over USB 2.0. As more and more devices come out supporting this new standard it is well worth the upgrade if you do not have it today. Moving from 480 Mb/s to 5Gb/s is a massive jump in speed. IF you are running an old motherboard that doesn’t have SATA III and USB 3.0 then you should highly consider upgrading. The good news is even if you have the older Lynnfield chip you can find motherboards with both of these technologies that support that CPU. But given the price of and i7-2600k or i5-2500k why wouldn’t you upgrade the CPU at the same time.

For gamers the average 15% improvement we saw across our test games were mostly due to the GPU upgrade and unless you are rocking a really old system we would hold off on the whole system upgrade. It could have simply been the games we chose to play, but in all honesty I can say I simply could not really tell a difference from a GTX 470 and GTX 570. Sure the frame rates are better on the GTX 570 and it wins on all the benchmarks, but it didn’t feel liked it played any better or enabled me to turn on any more eye candy than I had with the old card. Now it is tough to find a GTX 470 these days if you have one and wanted to do SLI so that alone could motivate you to upgrade, just don’t expect a big WOW when you do.