I got an older machine at home that is still holding up for some production. But, i was curious to know if there is any significant speed gain to be achieved upgrading this PC in any way, or if its just a waste of money/time.

Motherboard: Z87X-UD5H
RAM: 16GB Ram (Kingston Valueram DDR3 1333MHZ ECC 16GB, Kvr1333d3e9sk2/16g)
SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 500gb (plus a couple of HHD)

I mean, would any faster ram and newer CPU that fits the motherboard achieve a noticeable speed bump all combined? Cheers

 

Definately: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-13900K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770K/4129vs1537

Or wait for 14th gen Meteor Lake end this year.

 

If you aren't hitting the wall, it's waste of money really. From upgrading standpoint, you are in for an upgrade for sure, I had i7-3770 and barely saw a point in upgrading until recently, especially how slow things were moving in Intel land, now with all competition you can actually get yourself something worthy next 10 years of use. Maybe just not today, let the market and prices settle, some new tech to surface and all that, seems like new stuff is just around corner. (new Intel at end of the year for example)

Also stuff like this to get ironed
https://audiosex.pro/threads/latency-culprit-found.71191/

As far as upgrading what you have, think you hit the wall there basically, you can double the RAM, but still, that's the most CPU you can have there.

 

thanks guys, yeah @anonymouse for sure it would be a nice step up, but it more as @Melodic Reality is thinking, the gain in upgrading it within what its possible with its current motherboard really, other-ways i think it may be a waste of money and better spend starting fresh as you pointed out.

But i was more thinking in term of what can be done with the current motherboard, if anything of course. I guess it would be very small gains but i thought its worth asking

 

Last edited: Sep 21, 2023

Very small, also asking prices for the second hand of this older stuff is little ridiculous also, they pray on the fact that you need that to upgrade and stuff is out of production, IMO it's almost never good idea to upgrade few years old system, better just get something current for little more. You can actually save few bucks too, sell your mobo, RAM and CPU for similar ridiculous asking price and use your case, power supply and SSD for new build.

You can pretty much get previous gen stuff for great buck, for example combo of AMD Ryzen 5600G, Gigabyte B450 DS3H and Corsair Vengeance 32GB 3200 Mhz DDR4 RAM for something like 220 bucks brand new, guess you can get at least 120-150 bucks for current Mobo, CPU and RAM sold separately second hand.

 

hadn't a clue about this, interesting. thanks for that setup tip!

back in the day there were some preferences regarding intel vs amd for audio, do you know of a similar deal for that? maybe that is no longer an issue

 

It's not that big of an issue these days, they perform really close, combo I mentioned is really working great, I build that same machine for my friend and he couldn't be happier, using onboard VEGA GPU even for gaming, DPC latency is really great also, dunno, for that kind of money that's good remedy until you splash some huge buck on something current IMO and still enjoy the fact you can load quite a few instances of everything in your projects.

 

not worth at all imo,
although it's fairly old platform, it's not lacking any important instruction sets required for current software (at least I think),
lack of HEVC decoding/encoding acceleration would matter when watching/editing videos, which is beyond audio work,
only real drawback is lack of bootable NVME SSD support (which can be still used as secondary SSD no problems using some generic PCIe NVME adapters)

it's Windows being the elephant there, being more and more bloated,
I'm using few i7-4770 based machines for all sorts of things (Proxmox, MacOS, Windows 7/10/11...) and it's a surprisingly capable platform even nowadays,

i7-4770K shall be compared with i3-13100 (both have 4 cores, 8 threads)
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1919vs5170/Intel-i7-4770K-vs-Intel-i3-13100

- although numbers say 40-50% more performance (mainly due to higher clocks at lower power draw), it's questionable how important is few second difference in anything,
is there anything particular regarding performance you're not happy with current setup?

or are you just curious on going full new Windows 11 compatible system?
imo it's too early for a full W11 jump yet

you can't really fit any better cpu or better RAM (just more RAM eventually) or better SSD (just bigger SSD eventually)

 

Your motherboard wont accept the latest CPU.
Your i7 4770k is 10 years old - if you compare it to current i7 13700k the effective speed increase are :

single-core speed +120%
dual Core Speed +131%
Quad Core Speed +166%
8-Core Speed +235%

Performance increase is HUGE.
But you need to change almost everything : motherboard, cpu, ram (DDR5 is mandatory for current CPU otherwise you loose a lot of interest of upgrading), power supply ...

10 years for computers is a very big gap !
Is you smartphone 10 years old ? -> it's more or less the same for computers.

 

As people said, you can't significantly upgrade that PC without replacing the motherboard and RAM. It's outdated, destined to be a spare PC, like my old i7-3770K I use for a media PC. CPUs require specific socket pinouts, and you wont get much gains by replacing the CPU with a compatible one, not to mention potential BIOS incompatibilities. DDR3 RAM is old and slow, and there is potential for that being a bottleneck in modern applications that expect more bandwidth. For any real gains you would need to build a new PC, and with that, I would wait.

Current CPUs largely require water-cooling, due to the extreme temps (Intel and AMD have been resorting to desperation tactics to remain competitive lately). Current Intel CPUs have serious vulnerabilities. And AM5 motherboards have been highly problematic, not to mention DDR5 RAM is required and is a bit pricey. You could get a last-gen CPU like Ryzen 5600x if you can find decent AM4 mobos and DDR4 RAM on sale.

The upcoming Ryzen 8000 series could be a major gamechanger, and could be worth waiting for. Even the low-end has potential to be an Apple M2 killer, that will likely be used in newer laptops and the Steam Deck 2. Even the lowest end has the potential to be significantly faster than Ryzen 5600x.

 

Last edited: Sep 21, 2023

Not really true, I have both desktop, laptop and mini-pc based on latest i7, none are water-cooled, and all of them are performing as expected 10 hours/day.
BTW none of them are using "gaming" gpu. only built-in intel chip.

 

It depends on the CPU. Laptop and Mini PCs typically use low-power variant CPUs, they sacrifice performance to be compatible with rudimentary heatsinks and fans (which is not a bad thing, the low-end is getting better over time). Running Cinebench on a i9-13900k is going to thermal throttle at 100 C with air cooling and its lifespan will be significantly reduced over time at such high temps. An non-OC i7-13700K might scratch by without throttling around 80-90 C. But even if Intel claims 90 C is a "safe operating temp", those aren't necessarily 'safe' temps, you can't beat physics, it will be stressing the CPU, wearing down the silicon over time, slowly causing damage and reduced performance and stability, ultimately giving it a shorter lifespan than past CPUs. Manufacturers aren't concerned with this since it leads to more sales - planned obsolescence at work. OP's i7-4770k and my i7-3770k still work after a decade precisely because of how cool they run. People use watercooling to get temps as low as possible and maximize its operating lifespan, 65-75 C is the sweet spot. A Ryzen 5600x and its peers are some of the last released CPUs that don't hit 80 C at full load using a decent tower air cooler.

 

Last edited: Sep 21, 2023

None of mine are low-power variant (even in my notebook). Cinebench is pretty CPU intensive, but for DAW/audio it's working like a charm, and enable to use lot more VST/audio tracks than 10 years old i7. My main system is i7-13700k, air-cooled, no problem so far.
Just my 0.2 cent

 

I find 10 years is a great lifespan for a computer.
Mine is mostly from 2017 - i7 7700 (non-k) + 32 G DDR4 and still performs well, but I have 4 years to make it a 10 year lifespan.
I am looking to the future as well - can't see any reason to upgrade this, but I do have additions that can go to another computer when the time is right.

 

let's clarify this - nowadays CPUs make use of more advanced frequency boosting compared to what that i7-4770K could,
years back CPUs were essentially limited by power delivery design of the motherboard,
nowadays CPUs are limited by "safe" temperature thresholds of heat output caused by power delivery - you can squeeze noticeably more performance if you rise limits in BIOS and provide superior cooling for a CPU nowadays (if interested, check something like Thermal Grizzly aftermarket heatspreader or mycro-direct-die)

 

yet, audio remains to be mostly a realtime thingy - you don't need speedier EQ or compressor, a computer either is capable of running a project of certain complexity using desired plugins or not,
you cannot compose and play virtual instruments faster than realtime (let's ignore AI for this time),
benefits of speedier renders are still quite negligible as we're talking about saving minutes at best,

biggest improvements in audio production were faster-than-realtime offline render, multitrack FX parallelization to utilize more CPU cores, direct asset preloading from SSD when using virtual instruments and libraries - but all that has been achieved before i7-4770 was released, so we're seeing only minor incremental improvements since then

 

I went from an old i7 3700 to an i7 13700k and I can confirm that it is a giant step ahead of the previous. It too is non water cooled with an inbuilt GPU. i'm a much happier camper now.

 

i went from i5-2500 to ryzen 7 5700x (8core 16threadz). it's about 10-20 times the power. and it's not really the speed of everything. it's like easily going uphill in 5th gear.. whereas the i5 i was in 2nd gear. does it make sense? i can use 16! samples buffer in studio one , pc doesnt even flinch, cpu usage 5-15%. brutal

 

If you were to upgrade RAM to 32GB at higher native speed, you will gain some performance. Replacing spinning rust that is not storage only with at least a 2.5" SSD will net additional read/write performance.

I could only find the following in my region as new:
Patriot Viper 3 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin PC RAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 15000) Desktop Memory Model PV316G186C0K

Ebay has many listings for PC3 15000 DDR3. Some at ridiculous prices, some at very good prices around $15 to $20 U.S.

The timings are a bit lose for these modules so, keep that in mind.

Have you considered a refurb 8th gen system (barebones or complete)?

 

I'm just here to be the devil on your shoulder saying "yes do it" I just got a i7-12700k and it smokes everything I throw at it. very fun to upgrade.