Buying New CPU

SMURFGAME

Reputable
Dec 18, 2015
14
0
4,510
I am possibly purchasing a new CPU to go along with the 980 Ti I just bought and installed into my system. Currently I have the i5 3570K and I will try to OC it and see if that stops the bottleneck I've been experiencing. If not, I was going to purchase a new CPU and I was wondering whether I should get an i5 or an i7?

I...

  • Edit here and there on my PC.
    Play most of the latest video games.
    Record some clips and sometimes entire matches
    I have streamed to twitch here and there
 
Solution
You shouldn't be experiencing a bottleneck. Even a brand new Skylake Cpu i5 compared with the Ivy Bridge i5 isn't going to give you significantly better performance.

Aspiring techie

Reputable
Mar 24, 2015
823
9
5,365
If you are comfortable with spending the money, I recommend going for an i7, specifically a Skylake one. If you are recording and streaming, then the i7 should eliminate any CPU bottleneck. Go with the i7 6700, unless you want to overclock, in which case get the 6700k version.
I recommended Skylake over Haswell because of the newer platform, DDR4, etc. The cost for a good Skylake platform has come down some.
 
What resolution are you playing at? In general the i5 is all you need for gaming, the i7 doesn't add to much to games since almost all of them ignore multicores and hyperthreading so their existence doesn't add much help. However hypterthreading does help if you have other programs running at the same time like a game recorder or something like twitch.

Ultimately you're paying a premium for the extra umph an i7 gives you over an i5 if all you're doing is playing games. i7 is more than worth it if you are doing production work though like autoCAD, video work, 3D model work.