Rene Lamontagne wrote:
I am contemplating upgrading my I7 950 system due to age, which I built
in 2010.
I would be looking at replacing 5 items.

CPU
Motherboard
Memory
Video card
CPU cooler.

I will keep the
Coolermaster CM690 II case
Corsair RM750i PSU
500 GB and 1 terabyte HDDs
5x 120 GB SSDs
Asus optical DVD burner

At the moment I am looking at

Intel i7 8700 CPU $400
Asus Z390 Prime MB $260
Asus RX 580 GPU $255
16 GB of G.Skill Trident 3200 Ghz memory $160
Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler $35

For a total of $1110 CDN

Seems like a lot of cash for an upgrade to a system which is already
fast enough and is totally trouble free, But I am looking to the future
and will pass it on to my Son, After all I am 85 years old and may not
be able to do this if I wait too long.

So Look at the component choices I have made and let me know if there
are better choices without going to extreme high end kit which I really
don't need. This is not set in stone as I need to have a serious
discussion with my Financial advisor (myself). :-)

Thanks to all

Rene

A buck doesn't seem to go as far as it used to,
when it comes to computer components.

Do you think your son would appreciate your (hypothetical) computer ?

For example, if I left a computer for my younger brother,
he hates computers. The last time I was talking to him on
the phone, he said he's in the process of quitting his
current job, because management want to "computerize"
operations. All he wants to do is put in a days work,
not putz around with tablets all the time. And after
me trying to input data for a survey at the doctors
office, I don't think I'd want to use a tablet
at work either (I'd definitely need a proper keyboard).

I already gave a computer to my brother, and he gave it
away to one of his friends. He tried it out for a while,
but when a friend expressed an interest, he gave it to him.

*******

It's OK to want a toy to play with, your own self.

A lot of regular computer usage, fits the single-thread model.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

The 9900K manages to achieve 5GHz on one or two cores, using
turbo. (It's possible Anandtech had a turbo table for the thing,
and you'd want to verify that.)

Whereas, the multithreading table, is less relevant. Sure, this
tells you how a multitasking compute job might finish a little
faster with one of the monster processors. But unless you're
a software developer, 28 cores would be a waste.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Even the 9900K has more cores than you might need for
Firefox or for gaming.

In any case, on that platform, you could look at the LGA1151 table.

http://www.cpu-world.com/Related_CPU...ee%20Lake.html

The 9900K is $700 CDN. The 9900K has graphics, while the 9900KF has
the graphics core removed (and isn't a dollar cheaper either).

Core i9-9900K 8/16 3.6GHz 5GHz 16MB 95W AVX, AVX2, HT, TXT, TBT, Unlock $488 USD

If they had a 6 core 5GHz version, I'd be happy with that too, as
long as it gave a decent clock boost over what I already
owned.

In terms of the motherboard having a lot of phases, there are
a couple reasons for that.

1) User wants to overclock to 5GHz on all cores.

2) But if you have any programs that use AVX512, a 95W processor
will draw a couple hundred watts when AVX512 kicks in.

Modern processors have "time constants" and "power limiters".
A motherboard with a "weak" regulator, could get away with that
by using fairly aggressive throttling. As "legally speaking", you
could cut off a 95W processor a couple seconds after it goes
over 95W, and throttle it. Or, you could use a longer time constant,
or remove the limit entirely, if the VCore is capable of
handling it (and the user selected a good enough cooler
for that situation).

As otherwise, I couldn't understand how a 95W processor
needs 12 phase power.

At one time, when phases cost a lot of money, you could
get 30W from a single phase. And some processors were
low power enough, you could power them off a single phase.
Having 12 phases at 20W each, would be sufficient to handle
an AVX512 loading.

I don't think I currently have any programs here, that
threaten to use that instruction. The Prime95 guy played
around with some flavor of AVX, but other than that, I don't
think that's a "gamer" instruction.

*******

If none of that interests you, your choices above are perfectly
reasonable.

We can no longer get improvements like the old days, where
my computer went from a Celeron 300 to a Tualatin 1400.
(I had to change the voltage regulator chip with a soldering
iron to do that.) The speedup on clock isn't quite as large today.

Paul