Best cpu for my MSI gtx 1070?

[Iricebowl]

Just got a msi gtx 1070 and was wondering what the best CPU is to get the best performance out of it. My motherboard is the ASUS H81M-A MicroATX DDR3 1333 LGA 1150

 

[MrWillyP]

To be honest you could go with an i5 4690 since your board isn't an overclocking board. Shouldn't bottleneck a 1070. But if you want some future proofing for future gpus, an i7 4790/ 4790k would be the best option. (I'd buy it used tbh, a new one is more expensive then a skylake i7

 

[Iricebowl]

To be honest you could go with an i5 4690 since your board isn't an overclocking board. Shouldn't bottleneck a 1070. But if you want some future proofing for future gpus, an i7 4790/ 4790k would be the best option. (I'd buy it used tbh, a new one is more expensive then a skylake i7

if i did upgrade my motherboard whats a good one?

 

[MrWillyP]

To be honest you could go with an i5 4690 since your board isn't an overclocking board. Shouldn't bottleneck a 1070. But if you want some future proofing for future gpus, an i7 4790/ 4790k would be the best option. (I'd buy it used tbh, a new one is more expensive then a skylake i7

if i did upgrade my motherboard whats a good one?

If you upgrade to a z97 board you can use the same RAM (reducing your costs). The thing is that most gaming machines only need an i5, but the cpu on z97 I would upgrade to is an i7 4790k, it's currently whhat I have and overclocks well (keep in mind you need a better cpu cooler for overclocking, th stock one is incredibly bad for overclocking)

if you upgrade to z170 or z270 (both overclock, but z170 is older and has less features, both use ddr4 RAM, so you'd need to upgrade that as well) you should go with either an i5 7600 or an i7 7700k. keep in mind that k chips on kaby lake and skylake don't come with stock coolers (kabylake is the 7000 series skylake is the 6000 series)

As I said you would see a minimal difference in gaming performace between an i5 and i7, i7s are meant for more professional use. The difference between the i5s and i7s is that the i7s have hyper threading. Hyperthreading (basically, this is oversimplifying it) basically doubles the thread count, increasing performance on multithreaded applications. games on average only use around 4 cores. so this is why an i5 performs similarly to an i7 in games.

Think of an application as a bowl of icecream, and a thread as a spoon. your spoon can only take one scoop at a time. Now you (the cpu) could technically eat more icecream then you could shovel in with just the one spoon. Hyperthreading gives you a spoon for both hands, so you can eat more ice cream.