Upgrade i7 960 or i7 2600 or increase RAM?

[idata]

In my latest build, I am running:

i5-750 on an

Asus P7P55D Pro motherboard,

8 GB DDR3 dual channel Corsair Ram

ATX Radeon 5770 1 GDDR5 Ram video card

OS is W7 Ultimate.

I am not big into overclocking. I do a lot of photo, video and audio work. I have had this build up and running for a year and while I have been satisfied with what I got for the prices, it has never reached the benchmarks published in various sites online. I am now reading about all of the new i7 chips, particularly the i7-960 and the i7-2600, with the prices being about what I paid for my current processor and motherboard. I understand that with either I will also have to upgrade my motherboard, however if possible, I would like to stay with my dual channel Ram and am happy with the calibration between my monitor, video card and Espon Photo printer. In reading all of the online reviews, I am looking for feedback as to which would provide me with better performance:

Simply upgrading my Ram to 16 GB 1333? (When I built my machine, they did not have 4 GB DDR3 Ram chips.)

Replacing my i5-750 with either the i7-960 or the i7-2600? From what I can see from the online reviews and blogs the i7-2600 is more geared to overclocking, has new Turbo Boost and contains onboard video processing. I have no interest in any of the three, but it will still take my dual channel Ram. Am I correct in these understanings?

As for the i7-960, it seems to be almost as fast as the i7-2600, but I do not see anything about its overclocking or video features, so I assume it has neither, which is fine. Hoever, I do not know if I will have to replace all of my Ram with triple channel chips?

I welcome any intelligent suggestions regarding upgrading my processors or just upgrading my Ram.

Thanks

[idata]

Thanks Parsec. You provided me with the remaining information I was seeking. Based on what I have gleaned, in my present configuration my hard drive speed, even at the 6GB standard, is the weakest link in the chain and will minimize or at least temper any improvements I attempt to make, even upgrading Ram, my MoBo and processor, without converting to an SSD. As stated, because of my multiple responsibilities (and no, I don't sleep much), for the last two years computer technology has been advancing faster than ever before, faster than I can keep up with; (e.g., Far more than when we went from disk drives to hard drives and went from DOS to standardize OSs like Windows). I just don't have the time to read the ever increasing number of white papers issuing from Intel and other manufacturers. This discussion was invaluable to me both professionally and personally. (Given today's society I probably spend as much time on keeping my 5 kids' laptops and desktops in a gaming mode appropriate to their ages, than on those at the office for which stability is the most important aspect.) I have concluded that my personal machine, which has been the topic of this discussion, is satisfactory for now and it will probably be about another year before an upgrade will result in significantly substantial improvements to warrant that upgrade on a price per performance analysis. There is little that my machine does not do, quickly and efficiently. Someone mentioned T.V. control, and being a builder of high grade home theaters, I probably have more test programs just for that than most people have total programs. I run my office servers and workstations, drobo, San, etc., remotely from this machine with no problem. Each of my photos, shot in Raw, average close to or exceed 100 MB per image. The videos on which I am working I upsample to hi def (if not already there) and are burned by my 2 internal BluRay burners to hi def BluRay format. And on and on as I previously outlined. However as I learned long ago, my Start only boots basic programs and services, keeping the maximum resources available for the particular program(s) that I need for a particular task, and based on the nature of the work I do, I can only do one task at a time. If I was a gamer, this would be an entirely different situation and it appears that gaming is what is pushing the technology at its present rate. But as said, regardless of Benchmarks (the value of which in terms of real life work), is minimal at best. My goal was to catch up to current technology from which I can make the decisions about which I have inquired. Thanks again.

[idata]

Hello, I do not have your configuration but will tell you my experience with an I7-860 relative to adding additional memory. First let me just say I have 5 exact copies of the same I7-860, all using an Intel DH55HC Motherboard, and all have 8 Gig Ram excluding the system where I do all my DVD creation, video editing, and HDMI to our TV, so there is one system used differently than the other 4. The others are dedicated to the Einstein at home project and run full tilt doing that effort. What I learned regarding the memory was the following. First to use any memory beyond the 4 Gig the OS must be 64 bit. I happen to be using Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. When the system runs out of the Ram (8 gig in my case) it will start to use the hard drive's space in a file called: pagefile.sys you can tell a lot by the size of this file as most of these are managed by Windows, the file size is an indication of the maximum overflow to the hard drive the system experienced in times past. For example on the systems doing only the Einstein work the size of that page file is 3.92 Gig so in my simple way of looking at this, on those systems the amount of Hard Drive space used (Used as RAM memory Overflow) since I built them has never exceeded 4 Gig, the Ram is 8 gig. However the file size on the system I use for the video work is 7.93 Gig, again it had 8 Gig Ram. I figured the "video" computer needed additional memory, as you know when using the hard drive to supplement the ram, the system is likely going to run much slower, so I put the 16 Gig Ram into that computer and was very very pleased with the increased response times. I am not using the SSD typed Hard Drives however I don't think even the SSD drive (that is considerably faster) is as good as having enough Ram. In my case the one computer that was using more than 4 gig of hard drive space to supplement the Ram, that system needed additional Ram and it ran significantly better after installing the 16 gig. Regarding the ram, use the fastest buss speed available, if you can use 1333, use it, and if you can use 2000 use it. The Motherboard determines the Ram capabilities, including any voltage considerations.

[RGiff]

AS Far as compairing a normal hard drive to a SSD , it would be like compairing a old mule to a corvette.