Replace cpu?

[petherf]

Hi
 I have a GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 2.0) and I7 930 and was thinking of replace the cpu to a gulftown I7 970 or I7 980X.
Is there anything i must do in bios or is it just to change them?
The 930 i see is 45 nm and the gulftown is 32 nm
I was thinking of these instead of buying a new rig just now.(Sandy bridge)
My psu is 850 w and Gigabyte 460 OC 1 gb sli
6 gb corsair ram

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

You shouldn't have any problems at all even if you wanted to go as high as the 990X. The board will support all of the CPUs as long as it is running the FF BIOS or later. As far as I am aware the FF BIOS actually was the one supplied with the motherboard so no worries.

http://uk.gigabyte.com/support-downloads/cpu-support-popup.aspx?pid=3449

[oggmonster]

imo its never worth upgrading just the CPU. What are you using the machine for?

You could overclock that 930 to 4ghz which is faster than the clock speed of the 980. The nocutua nh-d14 would be a good heatsink to do this with.

[bytheway_r]

Like oggmonster said, there's no point. Unless you can get these hexa-cores real cheap. They're completely pointless for most things as Sandy Bridge walks right over them ( in almost every test ) while being cheaper.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I would have to agree there. The i7 2600K can wipe the floor with all but the 990X and at the price of it I wouldn't bother unless you needed to run some heavy multi threading tasks. Price for price there is no competition.

[bytheway_r]

The i7 2600K can wipe thew floor with all but the 990X and at the price of it I wouldn't bother unless you needed to run some heavy multi threading tasks.

Problem is, it wipes the floor with the 990X, too. The only situation where the hexa-cores are better ( sometimes by a big margin ) is heavy load on all cores during rendering, transcoding, etc.
 
Even if you wanted to run raw processing power tasks I'd think of going with 2 SB rigs for a similar price to one 990X rig.

There's also the issue of SB reaching higher overclocks than the 990X. Some of the 2500K/2600K chips go over 5 Ghz mark ( on air, too ) while the 990X will struggle to go much higher than 4.6-4.8 Ghz.

[Dark Mantis]

Agreed! The price of the top end chip is silly money too. I can't see many people purchasing it unless they just want to have the bragging rights although for sheer raw power you can't beat it yet!