G4560 for 1080p gaming. Upgrade or not?

[mk_2]

I currently have the Pentium G4560 in my main PC. It sits along an RX 480 4GB and 8GB of DDR4 ram. My motherboard is an ASRock H270M Pro4.

Should I consider upgrading to an i5 7600, i5 7600K or i7 7700, taking into account that:

1) I game on a 27'' 1080p VA (BenQ) monitor which I do not intent to change soon.

2) I mainly game and some other operations are taking place into the background (namely uTorrent and an open browser with 30 tabs more or less)

3) I am trying to future proof the system as much as possible - as I will not change platform soon (e.g. to a Ryzen one) and just use a better processor available for the given platform (H270, 1151).

Which are your suggestions? Is this upgrade worth it or I should just wait out with my G4560 for a longer time?

 

[sizzling]

I'd go i7. The 4 threads of the i5 are starting to look a little dated as games have started using more. Also the extra threads of the i7 help with your multitasking. You can look at both the 7700 or 7700k, although you cant OC on your board the 7700k is higher clocked as standard, depends on price. However the 7700k won't come with a cooler.

 

[synphul]

It depends on what games you're playing. If mostly csgo or similar steam games then more cores won't likely help that much. Having lots of browser tabs open is more a stress on ram, when in the background programs generally default to a lower priority giving the program in focus (a game for example) higher priority. Some games will perform better with additional cores/hyper threading like witcher3, bf1 etc. By better I mean less fps drops and higher min fps which can be noticeable.

Since you have an h series board there's not a lot of reason to go with a k series cpu, the 7600k isn't much faster out of the box than a 7600 (only 100mhz). The 7700k is only 300mhz faster than the 7700. If your monitor is a 60hz then getting fps consistently higher in the 70-80+ fps range won't benefit you much as the panel can still only display 60fps. It depends on what your current fps are in the games you play as to whether a faster cpu will benefit you much. Physical screen size makes no difference, 24", 27" or 40". The system goes by the resolution which is still 1080p and that's mostly impacted by the gpu.

Have you run a program like msi afterburner while gaming to see what your fps look like in game and what percentage of cpu and gpu are in use? If most of your games are at 90% cpu and 100% gpu then a faster cpu may not improve things much. That situation would indicate your gpu is maxed out at the graphics settings and games you're playing. If the cpu is constantly at 90-100% and the gpu is only at 70-80% then a stronger cpu would likely improve things.

Torrent software shouldn't be using a significant amount of resources, mostly drive activity as downloads or uploads are being read/written to the drive. If it's the drive you're gaming from rather than a separate drive it could impact drive related performance. There are other instances where buggy torrent software could cause higher usage, flash ads could increase internet bandwidth and cpu usage or in some cases if infected like anything else extra (virus/malware) could cause higher than usual performance hits. There was a problem a couple years back where utorrent included something called 'epic scale' that was attached to their torrent client purposely. It used the cpu cycles of users to mine bitcoin for their parent bittorrent co.

 

[mk_2]

Thanks for the answers.

Well, what annoys me is that both the i7 7700 and i7 7700K seem to have thermal issues with almost all but the most exotic cooling solutions - and no, I don't plan to spend 80-100€+ for a cooler (air or hydro)

On the other hand, I fear that there is not enough performance gap between the 2 core - 4 thread pentium and the 4 core 4 thread i5 7600K (despite the big price difference).