i5-3470 For Gaming, Is It Time To Upgrade?

[insanium88]

I am debating weather or not to upgrade my cpu for gaming. I know I need a new GPU too (gtx 970) but the prices aren't where I want them to be at the moment. A few games like GRWL's get caught up on my processor and I am sick of frame drops. Will it be worth upgrading to an 8400/8600k?

 

[KiL3MaNjAr0W]

Your cpu is fine... gpu upgrade is more important.

 

[insanium88]

I made mention of the GPU. As far as the CPU being fine. I can tell you in many games, it's not. It wouldn't be so bad with optimization but lets not kid ourselves... concerning optimization, new release execute horribly. I would have been able to get much higher frame rate in games like BF4 or GRWL if it wasn't for my processor.

I am wondering if this generation will be enough of a boost to keep me gaming efficently for about 5 years to come or if I should wait for next generation. To me, the price point for performance seem to be there considering an upgrade for myself. I just need some fortification on my idea.

 

[KiL3MaNjAr0W]

I know of a few people who still game on 3rd and 4th gen i5 and i7's that's why I said it is still a capable gaming chip. I believe if you were to go above 1080p you would notice a dip in processor dependency and more put on the gpu increasing your processor life cycle.

 

[InvalidError]

I'd wait for the post-Meltdown/Spectre in-silicon fixes before upgrading to anything on Intel's side to avoid having to worry about possible performance losses from future iterations of the fixes.

 

[insanium88]

Odd most of the 2k-4k benchmarks i've seen between sandy bridge and coffee shows that raising resolution puts more stress on the GPU and showing very little increased stress on the CPU; even though an increase is still present. 1080p is my gaming preference atm. I don't need to go to 1440p just to force myself into upgrades quicker.

 

[insanium88]

"I'd wait for the post-Meltdown/Spectre in-silicon fixes before upgrading to anything on Intel's side to avoid having to worry about possible performance losses from future iterations of the fixes." This is one of my considerations as well. I am not sure that the performance will be effected or not but it's on my mind.

 

[gasaraki]

I made mention of the GPU. As far as the CPU being fine. I can tell you in many games, it's not. It wouldn't be so bad with optimization but lets not kid ourselves... concerning optimization, new release execute horribly. I would have been able to get much higher frame rate in games like BF4 or GRWL if it wasn't for my processor.

I am wondering if this generation will be enough of a boost to keep me gaming efficently for about 5 years to come or if I should wait for next generation. To me, the price point for performance seem to be there considering an upgrade for myself. I just need some fortification on my idea.

I have a first gen i7 and I game just fine at 3440x1440. If you are running everything at 1080 or lower then maybe the cpu will affect performance more.

 

[norcalsc]

Up until a wee, ago I was gaming with a i5 2400 with 16gb and gtx 1050ti, cpu bottleneck definitely held me back from getting the most out of the 1050. Just went to a i7 4770 and there is a drastic difference. Don't get me wrong the i5 was totally playable in a game like BF1 but it was totally choking from lack of processing power causing a bit of stutter and lag. The i7 handles the cpu intensive games with ease and gamplay is much smoother.

 

[dontlistentome]

You could move up to an i7 3xxx series CPU. It's likely that what's holding you back with that i5 is the lack of more than 4 cores/4 threads. I'd be willing to bet that in those games, once you have 8 threads then your performance will be based on the videocard and not on the CPU.

Of course the new Ryzen and Intel CPUs would remove any CPU concerns, but right now is really the wrong time to build one of those computers if you can avoid it. The other potential issue is the cost of an i7 3xxx series, depending where you live it might not be worth it. You'd sell your i5 too, to try to mitigate costs.

 

[okcnaline]

No point in upgrading. You get minimal improvements from going to a 4th gen CPU and DDR4 prices are out of the mind if you plan on upgrading to anything newer than Haswell.