[SOLVED] Pondering an upgrade, looking for some advice.

[Yeldur]

I've been pondering over an upgrade to my CPU for a while now, although the I7-8700k is still a good CPU, it seems to be the one component "dragging" my system down... At least based on the benchmark tests I've performed on it.

Total War type games are the main games I tend to play at the moment and from my understanding they're a bit more heavy on the CPU side than they would be on the GPU end (That being said though, the GPU end is fine as I'm running an RTX 2070 right now which outputs more than enough performance for me.

Here's my current benchmark on the CPU: Passmark Benchmark test - As you can see, it's not really dragging my system down all that much, however, I understand that there are better CPUs out there now.

Currently I'm running a motherboard that is an LGA1151 socket; and with that in mind my consideration of upgrading to the i7-10700k would obviously mean that I need to replace my MoBo with an LGA2000 socket.

The question now is:

Is the difference between an I7-8700k and an I7-10700k worth the justification to buying a new motherboard?

The second question is:

Is switching to an AMD 3950x an actual upgrade from a perspective of gaming, compared to my current CPU?

For relevance, I'm currently not overclocking my CPU nor do I have any plans to, at least not on this current CPU. (Technically speaking I can't, as I'm running a H sku motherboard with a k sku cpu (admittedly, not the smartest decision, but I never had any plans to overclock so I didn't really think about it))

 

[Eximo]

For RTS gaming, maybe. 3950x is probably overkill. 3900XT will have higher clock speeds, which is, in general, better for gaming. 12 cores is plenty for games that can utilize many threads.

I would wait though for the Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, should be quite a significant gain in general gaming performance. Also might knock down the price of those 3000 series CPUs a lot.

 

[tsibiski]

I second the 3900x. I have it, and I also play a lot of CPU intensive games, such as Stellaris. Annoyingly, that game only saturates a single core and doesn't use multi-core. But a lot of my other games are strategy games with heavy calculations like Civilization. Nothing I've ever played has come close to really stressing it. If you do more than gaming, like video editing, rendering, animations etc, then the 3950x makes a lot of sense. If you are just playing games that are heavy on the CPU, the 3900x is more than sufficient.

But if you have the extra money to burn and just want the best option in the few scenarios where it might make a noticable difference, than choosing the 3950x over the 3900x is not a bad decision - I'd just wager that you wouldn't notice even the slightest difference in performance (by eye - not in benchmarking with scores) in 99.9% of gaming scenarios.

 

[Yeldur]

For RTS gaming, maybe. 3950x is probably overkill. 3900XT will have higher clock speeds, which is, in general, better for gaming. 12 cores is plenty for games that can utilize many threads.

I would wait though for the Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, should be quite a significant gain in general gaming performance. Also might knock down the price of those 3000 series CPUs a lot.

Thanks for that, I'll hold off for now and see what we get when the 4000 series come out. I'd forgotten that would be coming out soon so definitely sounds better to hold off.

Quick question..
In this case is focusing on single core performance still superior when it comes to games? If so, would that not make the Intel the superior choice? I had heard that most games now or a lot of them were focusing more on multi-core which would make AMD the arguable best choice for the purpose of future proofing.

 

[Yeldur]

I second the 3900x. I have it, and I also play a lot of CPU intensive games, such as Stellaris. Annoyingly, that game only saturates a single core and doesn't use multi-core. But a lot of my other games are strategy games with heavy calculations like Civilization. Nothing I've ever played has come close to really stressing it. If you do more than gaming, like video editing, rendering, animations etc, then the 3950x makes a lot of sense. If you are just playing games that are heavy on the CPU, the 3900x is more than sufficient.

But if you have the extra money to burn and just want the best option in the few scenarios where it might make a noticable difference, than choosing the 3950x over the 3900x is not a bad decision - I'd just wager that you wouldn't notice even the slightest difference in performance (by eye - not in benchmarking with scores) in 99.9% of gaming scenarios.

The 3900x has definitely been a major contender, especially at such a low price. I do a bit of video editing/rendering occasionally but honestly nothing major and certainly not enough to justify a focus on those elements. My PC is definitely much more focused on gaming than it is anything else.

 

[Zerk2012]

To be honest your processor should still run everything just fine. Your gaming not running benchmarks and their about always something better or soon to come out better.

 

[Yeldur]

To be honest your processor should still run everything just fine. Your gaming not running benchmarks and their about always something better or soon to come out better.

That's true enough, I think I'm going to wait until the Ryzen 4000 series comes out and take another look then instead of lookoing to upgrade straight away.

I guess I'm just trying to push more frames to my machine in game. I'm definitely going to be looking at the RTX 30 series so maybe the Ryzen 4000 series CPU and the RTX 30 series will be a dual upgrade I'll do when they both release further down the line (Obviously 30 series is already out but I'm waiting for the other manufacturers such as MSI etc etc)

 

[Eximo]

Those are also already out, just no one has them in stock.

RTX3080 and RTX3090 AIB partner cards are out in the wild. Though there are some stability issues, so better to wait anyway.

RTX3070 mid-october. RTX 3060 no known release date.

Also 20GB and 16GB versions of the 3080 and 3070 supposedly. Probably be Super or Ti.

And AMD has the 6000 Series cards to come out. Early stuff looks good for a possibly more power efficient card then what Nvidia is offering, but performance might be underwhelming. Certainly doesn't have as many neat features as Nvidia has baked into the hardware.

 

[Zerk2012]

That's true enough, I think I'm going to wait until the Ryzen 4000 series comes out and take another look then instead of lookoing to upgrade straight away.

I guess I'm just trying to push more frames to my machine in game. I'm definitely going to be looking at the RTX 30 series so maybe the Ryzen 4000 series CPU and the RTX 30 series will be a dual upgrade I'll do when they both release further down the line (Obviously 30 series is already out but I'm waiting for the other manufacturers such as MSI etc etc)

As of now if your looking for FPS Intel is still king really shines if your on a 1080p monitor.

 

[Yeldur]

Those are also already out, just no one has them in stock.

RTX3080 and RTX3090 AIB partner cards are out in the wild. Though there are some stability issues, so better to wait anyway.

RTX3070 mid-october. RTX 3060 no known release date.

Also 20GB and 16GB versions of the 3080 and 3070 supposedly. Probably be Super or Ti.

And AMD has the 6000 Series cards to come out. Early stuff looks good for a possibly more power efficient card then what Nvidia is offering, but performance might be underwhelming. Certainly doesn't have as many neat features as Nvidia has baked into the hardware.

Yeah, definitely won't be slipping away from Nvidia any time soon. Shadowplay is too good to pass up unfortunately, such an easy to use and useful feature hahahaha!

I'll probably end up getting a 3080 eventually, though I'm not in any rush really. I've got a 2070 and it works fine.

 

[Yeldur]

As of now if your looking for FPS Intel is still king really shines if your on a 1080p monitor.

Still rocking 1080p for now; overall I don't think I have any plans to upgrade right now but overall, hitting either 120/144 FPS in stability is my aim anyways. 1440p and 2160p are of course desirable but you're not going to be hitting 120/144 FPS in stability with that type of setup from my understanding (At least from my understanding)

Eh, we'll see what the 4000 series CPU AMD releases are like, who knows, maybe they'll do something magical like Nvidia and blow the 10700k out of the water

 

[Eximo]

Annoyingly, looks like it is to be the AMD 5000 series. All my recent posts...

Either they wanted the 500 series chipsets to go more with 5000, or they skipped the number 4 due to Chinese superstition. (Something like 4 sounds like the word for death and is considered unlucky)