Looking for advice about current range of CPUs

[Spitoon]

It's looking like the current iteration of my main machine - although it's done me proud for 2 or 3 years - now looks as if it might be on its way out.

It's struggling with some of the heavy tasks I give it anyway - or more correctly, I get a bit frustrated waiting for it to finish them - and there doesn't seem to be a viable upgrade path with the present motherboard (LGA1366 board with i7 920).

So I'm thinking of an upgrade to motherboard and processor. The demanding stuff I use it for is HD video processing - which I'm just getting into - working with big hi-res images an publishing stuff.

I don't follow these things closely and the current options for a high end machine appear to be Ivybridge 1155 socket and Socket 2011.

It's early days of researching all this stuff but I haven't found a simple explanation of the pros and cons of these two options. Any explanation or advice from hardware gurus would be very welcome. TIA.

[Loose rivets]

So the 386, EVEN WITH CO-PROCESSOR, is passé then?

[PhineasC]

I don't know what sort processing power you are looking for but have thought about going down this route:
HP XW6600 DUAL QUAD CORE XEON 2.66GHZ 4GB RAM 250GB HD | eBay

I've bought a couple of these machines and they've all been excellent,
if you have an XP license with your current machine then an OS downgrade is possible.

[Bushfiva]

Very roughly, socket 1155 supports CPUs with built-in GPUs, 2011 doesn't
1155 supports dual-channel RAM, 2011 supports quad-channel.
1155 supports 4 USB 3.0 ports natively, 2011 supports lots.
2011 has higher PCI-e bandwidth.

Right now, building a 2011 system is somewhat more expensive that an 1155 system, and there's not as much choice in CPUs. 2011 is somewhat more server-side, because of the available CPUs. Gaming and editing systems tend to be built around 1155.

Things might be very different in 6 months as the new wave of CPUs come out.

(Note a particular motherboard might not offer you all features of the chipset.)

E&OE, etc.

Edited to add: I'm not pushing on-die GPUs as a plus point, just saying.

[The late XV105]

Bushfiva's covered off the sockets, but I recently had a similar requirement as described here including what I ended up buying.

HTH.

[Booglebox]

I have an HP XW6400 myself. Thing is about 6 years old, stuffed full of hard disks and a Nvidia GTX275 graphics card, and runs like a charm. If your video editing software is properly multi-threaded it should absolutely fly on an XW6600 with 8 cores, and you get ECC error protected RAM to boot.

[peterh337]

At work we have just bought a couple of fanless Intel I5-based machines from QuietPC, which have turned out to be amazingly fast. They normally run FreeBSD but I install a copy of XP on a little partition just for some hardware checking out and the thing runs faster than anything I have seen before. Their quality is also very good - except for some "junior" in their assembly shop not doing up some screws...

From time to time I do some video editing and that really slows down my otherwise completely usable dual core PC. The last video here (EGKA-LELL) took about 70hrs to render in total. Obviously, no hardware that exists in the current universe is going to bring that 70hrs down to say 1hr but ISTM than an I7 processor is the way to go.

Also some video editing programs (I use Vegas 11) apparently use the graphics card as a coprocessor and then you need to make some specific and non-obvious choices, in high end graphics cards.

I am really impressed with these fanless PCs. I have bought and built many PCs over the years and the fans always pack up on them, fairly soon. In the ones I build I use Sanyo SanAce fans (which at £30 each are about 60x dearer than the Chinese ones normally used) and they last for ever, but you still don't have a silent computer...