Don't know what to upgrade

[tomoleary97]

I am looking to upgrade my motherboard as it is of quite low quality and maybe get some better RAM but i am unsure of what would be best for me to choose. Many of the parts are from old pc's that i have found for cheap.

My current specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1600MHz (corsair)
Motherboard: Gigabyte H81M-S2H
GPU: GTX 1080 (MSI)
Storage: 125GB SanDisk SSD, 1TB Seagate HDD

Any ideas on good motherboards with reasonable pricing would be much appreciated same for the RAM as i want something that runs a bit faster than 1600MHz.

 

[The Paladin]

LGA 1150 Motherboards are hard to find and not cheap (80-150$ for Z87 or Z97 Board.) which would be your "upgrade" and minimal gains since you don't have a K cpu to OC., considering that 1866 ram over 1600 improvement is minimal to be honest

but if your looking... expect z97 motherboard to run 100-150, and 16GB run 80-100 what is your budget like ?

 

[rolli59]

Neither upgrade ram or motherboard will have any noticeable performance difference while gaming. Your CPU is multiplier locked and 16GB ram is plenty for gaming. Spending money on faster ram at high prices right now will not be worth the money in incremental performance increase.

 

[drbones8472]

If everything is running fine on your PC, I would actually recommend going a different direction as far as upgrading your setup. Instead of a Mobo/RAM I would either add more/faster Storage in the form of a higher capacity SSD or maybe even getting a bigger/better Monitor with Gsync or a higher Screen Resolution.

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

Yeah right now, you basically have single core performance of ryzen. So I'd guess your i7 is comparable to a ryzen 1500x. As they said above, you really aren't going to gain much by upgrading boards, especially with a locked CPU.

To get an upgrade on CPU performance you'd really need to upgrade to 8th generation with a new z370 board and ddr4 ram. So you'd be talking a few hundred at least. Depends how much you want to spend. That said, as someone else said, you could go to more SSD storage.

 

[tomoleary97]

LGA 1150 Motherboards are hard to find and not cheap (80-150$ for Z87 or Z97 Board.) which would be your "upgrade" and minimal gains since you don't have a K cpu to OC., considering that 1866 ram over 1600 improvement is minimal to be honest

but if your looking... expect z97 motherboard to run 100-150, and 16GB run 80-100 what is your budget like ?

so if i want to do an upgrade i should upgrade the CPU as well and if so what should i upgrade to? my pc is used for games development as well so im looking for future upgrades as rendering is rather slow.

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

It depends what you want to spend. But you might look at the ryzen 8 cores. Or check out the newer 8th generation Intel i5's and i7 CPUs.

 

[tomoleary97]

It depends what you want to spend. But you might look at the ryzen 8 cores. Or check out the newer 8th generation Intel i5's and i7 CPUs.

i was looking at potentially upgrade to a new i7 but i'm not too sure as i have never used AMD processors before so i need to do a bit more research to see what is better for my case.

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

Don't blame you. The newer ryzen chips are not the dogs that FX chips were. Depending what you buy, when you get to the 6 cores and 8 cores, multitasking is pretty decent with them. Single core performance is similar to haswell though. That said, in April I think newer ryzen CPUs are coming out. So if you decided for AMD then you might want to wait.

Intel CPUs tight now though, single core performance is better. But if your rendering takes lots of threads and lots of cores, ryzen is worth a look anyway. They are supposed to be decent for workstations, but they can game a bit. Just southerly behind Intel on that one front.

If you go Intel, you'll need to get a z370 board, so that will cost a little more. If you go ryzen, you can go cheaper on the boards, and get a decent b350 board that allows overclocking for not much money. 70-90 should get a decent one. Which you'll want to overclock a little. The stock coolers can even handle a bit of overclocking and still cope ok.

But you've got options. If you need the best of both worlds, you'll probably want to look at the i7 8700k with 6 cores and 12 threads.