I currently have an ASUS A97 Evo R1 with AM3 4 core 3 Ghz which is now 4 years old. I am contemplating upgrading to a ASUS Sabertooth 990 FX R2.0 fitted with AM3 8 core Piledriver 3.50Ghz. I am wondering if this is a worthwhile upgrade? I am not a gamer but use quite a bit of DTP which does run slow on my current setup. Currently have 13 Gb installed. As far as I can see the ASUS uses the same memory. Any thoughts welcome.
The upgrade will give you a boost if your work is CPU intensive, but Piledriver is 3 years old (yes, AMD had nothing new on the Desktop market in the past 3 years). If I had your money to spend I would either go Skylake or wait for Zen (AMD future CPUs which should be released next year).
Thanks for the info. Skylake looks good but is twice the price and would have to upgrade the memory as well so puts it out of budget. Just had a quick look at the Zen and that will also move to DDR4. Also likely early versions will need to be proven before commiting. Anyway, food for thought.
Also, remember DDR4 is quite new, and lot costlier than DDR3 at this moment. What are the software's do you use for DTP. Maybe check for benchmarks and see how the newer processors from AMD/Intel stacks against to your current setup.
It is a worthwhile upgrade and considerably cheaper than Skylake (or even Haswell/Broadwell). Also, with that mobo you can overclock the CPU past 4.0GHz with ease (with the proper cooler).
Just remember that in terms of operating system licenses, a new motherboard is considered a new computer and new computers need new operating system licenses. So be sure to budget for that too. This applies to all OEM/System Builders license - which by far, the vast majority of Windows licenses are.
I second that. All my builds use SSDs now - don't see how I could live with an HD, except for storing backup images of my SSDs.
