CPU Upgrade From i5-7500 on b250 Motherboard

erik62905

Honorable
Jan 17, 2018
183
17
10,715
I have an i5-7500 and am wondering what CPU is a worthy upgrade from it, if any. I am thinking of a i5-7600k as the clocks are higher than the locked i5-7600. I am also thinking of the i7-7700 as that has 4 cores and 8 threads. I obviously can not overclock because of my motherboard's b250 chipset. I do not want to upgrade motherboards and that means I do not want to get an 8th gen processor. I plan to get either a GTX 1070 Ti or a GTX 1080 or wait until the next generation of Nvidia GPUs and want a minimal bottleneck.
 
Solution
If the B250 motherboard supports the 7700"K", get it....; not sure why some folks think $20-$30 more for 600 more MHz across all cores base clock and 300 more MHz in turbo (over the 7700 non-k) is insignificant, but, ....it is not.


Not necessarily true on the i7 Kaby Lake. There's a significant CPU speed difference between the 7700 and 7700K for example (all four cores referring to below):

7700 - base 3.6GHz, boost 4.0GHz
7700K - base 4.0GHz, boost 4.4GHz

That's effectively 16.6% base and 10% boost speed increases for the K which in the overclocking world would be considered a decent moderate overclock...nothing to sneeze at.

 
^^For gaming, it depends on the monitor resolution. At 1080p, the faster speed translates to faster FPS. If running 1440p or especially 4K, it's not so important. I've done a LOT of gaming benchmarks over the years messing around with CPU and GPU overclocks with different resolution settings. These results also show up on productivity apps like video editing.