• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

2500 vs 2500k

G

guppie

n00b
Joined
Apr 2, 2011
Messages
58
I know if I upgrade to a i7 cpu then I'd have to go through reformat/reinstall everything headache, so I'll make this short and sweet...

I currently have a 2500 (non k) and BF3 loading times are driving my nuts!

Would it be worth it to swap it out with a 2500k and OC slightly (i.e. 10%)?
I don't want to throw any more money out the window and I imagine this would be the easiest CPU transition in terms on NOT having to reformat/reinstall everything. I keep reading/hearing how well the 2500k performs when its OC'd...

Or is this just a stupid idea?
 
Wrong on the i7 upgrade... No reinstall necessary... Maybe a reboot.... And NO, if you plan on OC-ing only "10%", it's NOT worth it..... You got to OC at least to 4Ghz if you wanna see any gains...
 
Also, OCing a 2500K is not going to improve loading times.

Improve frame rates? Definitely. You would definitely gain an FPS improvement in multi-player if you went with a 2500K somewhere in the 4GHz+ range (4.2 vs 3.3 was noticeable for me, and I'm only running a GTX 460).

Want improved loading times? Get an SSD. I was quite pleased at the difference my SSD made in BF3 map-loading times.
 
The question is why do you want to upgrade and how much will it cost you. You should have no trouble overclocking the CPU to 4.2-4.5 on stock voltage.
 
You could go from a Sandy based Celeron to a Core I7-2700 and not have to reinstall windows. It doesnt work like that. The processor is completely transparent to your OS. You used to have to do that like 20 years ago but no longer.
 
guppie said:
I currently have a 2500 (non k) and BF3 loading times are driving my nuts!

Would it be worth it to swap it out with a 2500k and OC slightly (i.e. 10%)?
Click to expand...
Not worth it. Especially considering that you can already OC your current 2500 by 10%: The multiplier on the 2500 is limited, not locked. As such, you can OC that 2500 to 3.6Ghz or so by raising the multiplier ratio and other settings. But that probably won't improve your load times. Higher FPS of course.

If you truly want to improve loading times, get a SSD as others have said. Both of the drives listed in your sig aren't that fast. If you use the right drive cloning software as well as minimize the size of your OS install + games storage, you can clone your current OS over to a SSD and it should be alright. Though if you want a surefire way of getting the most performance out of your SSD, a fresh install is necessary.
 
SSD all the way!

I've been reading SSD reviews forever and thought it would make a big difference, but until I bought one recently I had absolutely no idea just how much! Prices have come down quite a bit lately too, there seem to be quite a few really top notch drives close to $1/gig (I bought a 128gb Samsung 830, but was also tracking the Corsair Force GT and OCZ Agility 3).
 
Is your game running off the same drive as your OS? I seen a major gain by moving the whole directory to another drive and playing off that drive opposed to my OS drive. Also, the 1155 sockets perform a lot better if you're in dual-channel. But, now I currently run on a SSD, but load time before my upgrade made a dramatic difference. You'll probably feel better gameplay and won't have much micro-stutter. But try that out.
 
I would recommend SSDs all day. I have two 60GB in raid 0 and an 80GB to cache my 500GB data drive. My load times for MW3 went from around 45 seconds to like 10 seconds. Thats also from a cached drive data drive.
 
Last edited:
guppie said:
I know if I upgrade to a i7 cpu then I'd have to go through reformat/reinstall everything headache, so I'll make this short and sweet...

I currently have a 2500 (non k) and BF3 loading times are driving my nuts!

Would it be worth it to swap it out with a 2500k and OC slightly (i.e. 10%)?
I don't want to throw any more money out the window and I imagine this would be the easiest CPU transition in terms on NOT having to reformat/reinstall everything. I keep reading/hearing how well the 2500k performs when its OC'd...

Or is this just a stupid idea?
Click to expand...
All your steps are incorrect

At firt, slow loading times are caused by magnetic drive you have game installed on.
For second, overclocking wont change that either as the entire CPU performance is always bottlenecked by hard drives. So buying 2500K would be a good waste especially when slight OC you can do with your 2500 either(locked CPUs supporting turbo boost allow you to overclock +4 bins higher than is max turbo range, so optionally(if you have P67 or Z68 MB) you can make slight OC to 4.1GHz.
Upgrading to either sandy bridge or ivy bridge i7 in case of just replacing the CPU, not motherboard you would be freed form reinstalling everything and your computer would work just like before.
So to improve loading times, get SSD and connect it to SATA3 port.
 
Last edited:
You gotta get the SSD to get faster loading times. Remember we were buying 7200 RPM drives over 10 years ago. ;)
 
I had BF3 on my Crucial M4 SSD and I would always load maps before the game start count down. It took 15 seconds to go from desktop to ingame.
 
Dejahboi said:
Is your game running off the same drive as your OS? I seen a major gain by moving the whole directory to another drive and playing off that drive opposed to my OS drive.
Click to expand...

Is that a fact? I just installed a SSD on my main rig this past weekend. It was just a 60GB, so obviously it's primarily for my OS and other small programs, but all of my games are now dedicated to my 640GB drive completely separate from the OS.
 
I have a 15k rpm cheetah sas 300gb that has a 4ms access time and 190mb/s avg read write speeds. Its a $400 drive. While it absolutely destroys any sata6gbs drive in performance my 256gb crucial m4 annihilated my sas drive in everything performance and cost almost the same.
 
guppie said:
I know if I upgrade to a i7 cpu then I'd have to go through reformat/reinstall everything headache, so I'll make this short and sweet...

I currently have a 2500 (non k) and BF3 loading times are driving my nuts!

Would it be worth it to swap it out with a 2500k and OC slightly (i.e. 10%)?
I don't want to throw any more money out the window and I imagine this would be the easiest CPU transition in terms on NOT having to reformat/reinstall everything. I keep reading/hearing how well the 2500k performs when its OC'd...

Or is this just a stupid idea?
Click to expand...

yes its a stupid idea, 2500>2500K is a waste of money

CPU don't improve loading times, Solid State Drive does....... and no you don't need to reformat/reinstall Windows for a CPU swap
 
For load time a SSD will blow anything else away. With resent price drops you can pick up an Intel® SSD 520 120GB for under $200 that will work great as a boot drive for your OS and a couple games.

As far as reformating and re-install your OS the general rule is if you change motherboards you have to reinstall but in a lot of cases as long as you are staying within the same chipset or even chipset family you may not have to reinstall. I was able to change out an Intel Desktop Board DH67CL for a Intel Desktop Board DZ68DB without any issues.
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
As far as reformating and re-install your OS the general rule is if you change motherboards you have to reinstall but in a lot of cases as long as you are staying within the same chipset or even chipset family you may not have to reinstall. I was able to change out an Intel Desktop Board DH67CL for a Intel Desktop Board DZ68DB without any issues.
Click to expand...

You do not need to reinstall Windows. I went from an AMD system to an Intel system and I didn't have to reinstall Windows. The trick is to set the IDE ATA/ATAPI drivers to the default Microsoft ones, then voila, everything will work perfectly, you'll just need to install the motherboard's drivers.
 
I agree with everyone saying the CPU wont matter, its the drive. Look at your CPU usage while its loading the game, it will be around like 5-10% which is nothing. If it truly was the bottleneck it would be maxed out, in which case if you upgraded to something faster it would be either a little less than maxed out, or still be maxed out but load the same thing faster.
 
xTrident said:
Is that a fact? I just installed a SSD on my main rig this past weekend. It was just a 60GB, so obviously it's primarily for my OS and other small programs, but all of my games are now dedicated to my 640GB drive completely separate from the OS.
Click to expand...

Well before I had my SSD, I had all my applications on a crappy 100GB SATA Maxtor 7200rpm drive. I was always 1st-3rd person to load in with 30-45 seconds for the actual game to start. Now I have my 6gb 1.5tb and Sata III, the performance are as equal. From the beginning I had everything all in one drive, and had crappy stutters and load times.
 
SSD all the way. I have a 1st gen trim drive from over 2+ years ago and the though it doesn't have near the mb per sec as current SSD drives it still smokes any 7200 rpm hard disk in windows and game load times (random access time ftw!).
 
Quake said:
You do not need to reinstall Windows. I went from an AMD system to an Intel system and I didn't have to reinstall Windows. The trick is to set the IDE ATA/ATAPI drivers to the default Microsoft ones, then voila, everything will work perfectly, you'll just need to install the motherboard's drivers.
Click to expand...

Wish I had known this months ago when I went from AMD 1055T to Intel 2500. I will try that on my son's computer as I would like to get a cheap barebones AMD quad core and get rid of his Intel Pentium D 945
 
Yeah the only driver that windows *NEEDS* in order to boot is the disk controller. So as long as it has that you can just boot up, install new drivers and be ok, BUT changing mobo is a great time to do a fresh install anyways :)
 
Thanks for all the replies guys. I guess it's pretty obvious that SSD is going to make the most difference. It's nice to see that prices have fallen dramatically to a more reasonable level...
 
One other question, if I go the SSD route, my "C" drive is currently using approx 200GB (Win7, programs, games). I would need to uninstall just about everything and reinstall those programs on another drive (i.e. "E") but leave just Win7 and BF3 and a few other heavy games on the SSD?
 
Don't quote me right, but I believe theres a program where it'll just copy the essentials of the OS to your SSD.I would just do a fresh install without the your current drive onto the SSD, plug in the hdd after the install and transfer all to what ever you want from your current; reformat that drive, and install whatever you need.
 
For Steam games you can use SteamTool to move them off your main drive (and back on when you want them). Basically all it's doing is moving the actual directory and making a symlink on your C drive pointing at the other one. So you don't actually have to uninstall and reinstall every time, you just move the data.

AFAIK there's no tool for Origin games yet, but the idea is the same. Granted, while you're actually playing BF3 you'll want it on the SSD. =)
 
Ok, I just bit on a 240GB SSD (Newegg had an awesome deal that was hard to pass up). So can someone please help me out? Does the SSD come with software so that I can transfer the entire HDD over? My "C" drive is just under 240GB and I'll move the Steam games over to the HDD along with some other non essential programs. For the most part it will be just OS, Office, BF3. I've read that I should not load the drive near its capacity? Is there a way to automatically prevent this? I've also read there are a bunch of settings that need to be changed in the BIOS.

Just curious, does an SSD use less power? In case I choose to go the SLI route in the near future...
Thanks

(admins, please move to proper forum if necessary)
 
Just to follow up, I have the SSD running smooth and fast. BF3 load times have been reduced dramatically so much so that I now find myself waiting for the countdown or in the top 5 players to join.

BTW I did not did a fresh install. Call me lazy but I couldn't bring myself to reinstall dozens of programs and tweak all the settings and stuff. It would literally take hours. I used a free program called Macrium Reflect and it worked flawlessly AND it kept the alignment. I just had to disable a few settings in Windows 7 and I've ran several benchmarks (ATTO) and its performing up to par. I couldn't be happier! Like everyone else says, the difference of SSD vs HDD is crazy. My next project will be a new MB/CPU/SSD for my son without reinstalling Win7

I should've mentioned before that reinstalling Win7 requires me to activate and that headache process...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top