How urgently should I upgrade?

[Guest]

When I first built this PC its CPU and GPU were i3-4170 and GTX 950 which suit each other well, however when the 950 broke and I got it refunded, I ended up bumping up to an r9 380X nitro.

The i3 was going to need an upgrade at some point regardless, but now I feel more that it needs an upgrade. Cheapest i5 locally is the i5-4460 (boost to 3.4ghz) but as money for PC stuff is quite tight I am wondering how urgent you people would think this upgrade is? I play games like fallout 4, world of tanks, war thunder, kerbals space program, battlefront etc. on a 900p 60hz monitor with the frame rate target set to 60. Performance seems pretty smooth so far although in some more intensive games there will be a split second freeze when it is loading up a new section/ area where there wasn't before.

I can't really get a conclusive answer as to how badly mismatched this is and I want your opinions.

 

[Hellfire13]

no need to upgrade...coupled with a decent psu, that rig can still pull through another couple of yrs...its a 4th gen cpu and a pretty good gpu...
wats ur psu make/model/unit???
also amount of ram and build age???

 

[Technologify]

if the "split second freeze when it is loading up a new section/ area where there wasn't before" isn't bothering you, then you don't need to upgrade.

 

[bitwright]

If you're running at 60fps then you're fine. Sure, you may not getting the max possible performance out of your card, but it is obviously performing well. As for the split second freeze when loading, that's more likely a storage issue than a GPU/CPU issue. Are you still using an HDD? If so, consider a cheap SSD as your next upgrade. If I were you I would save up until I had enough for a Skylake or Kaby Lake i5 before upgrading furter

 

[Guest]

Okay, so I have an EVGA Supernova 750 G2 80+ gold PSU which I got for future proofing purposes so that's all fine. As for the occasional hold ups, those weren't really there with the GTX 950 but I have observed somewhat higher CPU load after getting this card due to the fact that AMD driver have higher overhead. In general though this is not an issue. Maybe a couple split sec freezes in the beginning of a game of battlefront which wasn't there with the 950, but after 10 seconds they won't happen again for the rest of the game. CPU was already maxed utilisations as it was before with 950 in that game. Generally I can tell this stuff only happens in CPU intensive areas. I have 8gb of DDR3-1600 in dual channel config, for RAM.

 

[rhysiam]

The i3 is actually ~10% faster in lightly threaded workloads, so in some games an i5 4460 would actually be slightly slower. Like others I don't think you should be in a hurry to upgrade. When a game comes out and you just can't get playable settings that you're satisfied with, that should be your motivation to upgrade.

Might also be worth keeping an eye out on the second hand market in your area. Any i5 4xxx CPU, and any i7 47xx CPU will go in your motherboard (with a BIOS update), there's heaps to choose from. Might be worth just looking from time to time. You might be able to pick up something faster than the 4460 for less money. Plus, if you avoid the "K" models, you can be sure they haven't been pushed too hard and you'd be unlucky to get a dud.
There's always a risk going second hand, of course, but if you are unlucky and hit an issue you have the advantage of being able to slap your i3 back in while you try and sort things out.

 

[Hellfire13]

thats pretty normal...u shd worry less abt it...
if u still want, as suggested above u can check ur hdd health through harddisksentinnel...

 

[Guest]

Already used data lifeguard to check multiple times... Always turned up fine. Also only started happening after the gpu upgrade because I imagine higher overhead