Upgrade from E5400 to i7 860 - worth it?

[chrisgeary]

I've got a Dell Inspiron 545 with an E5400 2.8Ghz core2duo in it. I can't say I've noticed that much of an improvement in performance WRT Lightroom/x264 processing compared to my old Dimension 8400 P4 2.8 GHz. Yes its faster but not as much as I thought.

Looking at the CPU benchmarks on line, it would appear the i7 860 really is a jump in performance... 2 or 3 times it would appear.

I'm looking at the Dell Studio XPS 8100 with the i7 860.. would I see 2-3x performance increase for Lightroom do you think?

 

[neil_g]

well the i7 860 is a 4 core 8 thread 2.8Ghz processor with 8Mb cache

the E5400 is a 2 core 2 thread 2.7Ghz processor with 2Mb cache

so yes you should. Lightroom is fairly processor intensive so worth the upgrade in my opinion.

 

[chrisgeary]

Thanks Neil.

 

[evilonion]

I moved from a core duo to an i7 and love it.
I highly recomend it

 

[david1701]

my i7 lappy is pretty darn responsive, consider ram aswell I have 4gb and fill it

 

[chrisgeary]

Conceivably, could I upgrade my current PC motherboard, processor and memory? Would that be more cost effective to achieve the same end?

 

[neil_g]

its possible, depends what form factor the inspiron is. sometimes dell use odd size motherboards. plus you may need to look at upgrading the PSU which is normally an odd size.