Should I upgrade from i7 3770k to i7 8700k

[ms228]

Hi all,

I'm really tempted to upgrade from my i7 3770k. I've got a GTX 1080 and I feel that the my current cpu may be bottlenecking me a bit at 1440p?

Do people think it's worth the approx £750 outlay, or should carry on the waiting game!?!

Thanks!!

 

[R_1]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html
unless the 8700k creates a new top tier, and even if it does, I do not think its worth the upgrade just yet.

 

[ms228]

I was trying to find some benchmarks comparing the two cpus at 1440p with a GTX 1080, but most of the benchmarks seem to be at 1080p. I don't suppose anyone can point me to any?

 

[R_1]

when the i7 3770 was released 1440 monitors were a rarity. it does not surprise me that the benches are hard to find to non-existent.

in this thread they discuss this but referring to a 7700k.
https://hardforum.com/threads/3770k-7700k-a-bust.1935282/

 

[mdd1963]

Are you at 60 Hz refresh? Or above?

That would likely be the determining factor.

 

[ms228]

Are you at 60 Hz refresh? Or above?

That would likely be the determining factor.

Hi,

I've got the Asus ROG Swift PG278Q (144hz - 1440p).

I'm finding playing bf1 there are points on a large multiplayer map were i'm getting frame drops, which i reckon must be the cpu bottlenecking.

Thanks

 

[ms228]

when the i7 3770 was released 1440 monitors were a rarity. it does not surprise me that the benches are hard to find to non-existent.

in this thread they discuss this but referring to a 7700k.
https://hardforum.com/threads/3770k-7700k-a-bust.1935282/

Thanks for the response! I was tempted with the 7700k or ryzen, but the gains just didn't look enough really. The 8700k though does seem to give a bit more of a jump though and with the extra cores i feel a little more ready for future titles (hopefully publishers will start to use more cores soon!!!)

 

[teknobug]

You may be waiting a while if you want to go with i7 8700K, Intel shipped a pretty small amount (likely on purpose) since most retailers are either "out of stock" or "backorder", and a lot of people that were waiting for it are turning to Ryzen for the lower cost and availability. They didn't do that with previous CPU's other than the i7 5770C.

 

[ms228]

The other thought i had is that i've got 8gb of RAM at 1600Mhz and wondered if this could be affecting performance. My I7 3770k is currently running at 4.4Ghz?

 

[qasim1991]

Maybe. BF1 is one of the new games that recommends 16gb Ram.

 

[U6b36ef]

Are you at 60 Hz refresh? Or above?

That would likely be the determining factor.

Hi,

I've got the Asus ROG Swift PG278Q (144hz - 1440p).

I'm finding playing bf1 there are points on a large multiplayer map were i'm getting frame drops, which i reckon must be the cpu bottlenecking.

Thanks

If you want to know what's bottlenecking, run MSI Afterburner (with whatever you want to monitor - 'ticked'). Then you can see what's maxing out when you get frame rate drops.

Or if you just want to monitor CPU, have Task Manager or Performance Monitor open in the background. Then minimise when you get frame rate drops and see if your CPU is maxing out.


Lastly, try not having any background apps like browsers open in the background. That causes me a lot of load sometimes on my CPU when gaming.


There are some games like The Witcher 3 that benefit from more cores and threads. 8700K benchmarks for that game are incredible on the CPU.

 

[theonerm2]

The other thought i had is that i've got 8gb of RAM at 1600Mhz and wondered if this could be affecting performance. My I7 3770k is currently running at 4.4Ghz?

A 16GB kit of 2400MHz RAM would help out in CPU limited scenarios. Then again RAM that fast might cause you to have to downclock a bit from your 4.4GHz OC. Really 16GB is the amount of RAM that I recommend going forward. That's how much you should have no matter the speed. Though it is important to at least have 1600MHz CL9 RAM for gaming. My CPU is 10% faster than yours on ipc and 10% slower on the clock. So our CPU's are pretty much equal. I have 2400MHz RAM which probably makes mine a bit faster in CPU limited scenarios. I can tell you that I use a GTX 1080 ti and I notice zero bottlenecks at 4K. That's the resolution I play at. 1440p I'm not sure but I can test it. I'll run a few tests and show you what upgrading your RAM could do. And if there is no major bottleneck on the GTX 1080 ti then there won't be on the GTX 1080.

Update:

With 2400MHz 16GB of RAM

Ghost Recon Wildlands 62 avg 51 min 98% GPU usage
The Witcher 3 100 avg 79 min 95% GPU usage
Battlefield 1 138 avg 106 min 93% GPU usage
Grand Theft Auto V 86 avg 62 min 85% GPU usage
Rise of The Tomb Raider 97 avg 34 min 97% GPU usage

With 1600MHz 8GB of RAM

Ghost Recon Wildlands 60 avg 51 min 97% GPU usage
The Witcher 3 98 avg 72 min 95% GPU usage
Battlefield 1 126 avg 101 min 85% GPU usage
Grand Theft Auto V 60 avg 42 min 83% GPU usage
Rise of The Tomb Raider 90 avg 32 min 90% GPU usage


So in this case at least it looks like faster and more RAM can have an impact on performance. There was a little bit of bottlenecking in some titles at 1440p but none what so ever at 4K. The bottlenecking should be even less on the GTX 1080 since it isn't as powerful as the GTX 1080 ti. Also keep in mind that some of the GPU usage percentages are estimates based on what I saw on msi afterburner overlay.

 

[Serinox]

The other thought i had is that i've got 8gb of RAM at 1600Mhz and wondered if this could be affecting performance. My I7 3770k is currently running at 4.4Ghz?

The other thought i had is that i've got 8gb of RAM at 1600Mhz and wondered if this could be affecting performance. My I7 3770k is currently running at 4.4Ghz?

A 16GB kit of 2400MHz RAM would help out in CPU limited scenarios. Then again RAM that fast might cause you to have to downclock a bit from your 4.4GHz OC. Really 16GB is the amount of RAM that I recommend going forward. That's how much you should have no matter the speed. Though it is important to at least have 1600MHz CL9 RAM for gaming. My CPU is 10% faster than yours on ipc and 10% slower on the clock. So our CPU's are pretty much equal. I have 2400MHz RAM which probably makes mine a bit faster in CPU limited scenarios. I can tell you that I use a GTX 1080 ti and I notice zero bottlenecks at 4K. That's the resolution I play at. 1440p I'm not sure but I can test it. I'll run a few tests and show you what upgrading your RAM could do. And if there is no major bottleneck on the GTX 1080 ti then there won't be on the GTX 1080.

Update:

With 2400MHz 16GB of RAM

Ghost Recon Wildlands 62 avg 51 min 98% GPU usage
The Witcher 3 100 avg 79 min 95% GPU usage
Battlefield 1 138 avg 106 min 93% GPU usage
Grand Theft Auto V 86 avg 62 min 85% GPU usage
Rise of The Tomb Raider 97 avg 34 min 97% GPU usage

With 1600MHz 8GB of RAM

Ghost Recon Wildlands 60 avg 51 min 97% GPU usage
The Witcher 3 98 avg 72 min 95% GPU usage
Battlefield 1 126 avg 101 min 85% GPU usage
Grand Theft Auto V 60 avg 42 min 83% GPU usage
Rise of The Tomb Raider 90 avg 32 min 90% GPU usage


So in this case at least it looks like faster and more RAM can have an impact on performance. There was a little bit of bottlenecking in some titles at 1440p but none what so ever at 4K. The bottlenecking should be even less on the GTX 1080 since it isn't as powerful as the GTX 1080 ti. Also keep in mind that some of the GPU usage percentages are estimates based on what I saw on msi afterburner overlay.

Since i am running a similar setup to ms228 i beg to differ on the worth of the ram upgrade.

My setup is:
Cpu: i7 3770k @4,4 Ghz
Mobo: Asrock Z77 WS
Ram: 16Gb Panram Light Swords DDR3-2400Mhz (4 sticks)
GPU: Palit Super JetStream 1080Ti @0,9 Volt 1860 Mhz

Even with more and faster ram the 3770k is at it´s limits at 144hz/WQHD gaming in some titles. Worst case scenario is battlefield 1, where the 1080Ti is around 80-90% average utilization (depending on the amount of players). Framerate is flucutating between 100-144fps and occasional drops down to the 70´s. As far as i am concerned, i would consider going for 8700k or waiting for the 8 core icelake i7 arriving at Q2/18. It´s not worth anymore to upgrade the ddr-3 ram, since the prices are inflated and you can´t use the ram for the newer platforms. However it would be a no brainer if you had a ddr-4 platform.

 

[munchy22]

im on the edge of the same upgrade, mainly due to broken usb headers and a dodgy on-board network driver on mobo. My 1070 runs all games on my i7 3770 with anything from mostly medium to high graphics at 100hz monitor, x34 predator. Some older games like bf4 its just overkill. To be honest i play gta 45 with nearly full graphics but a few settings down to maintain a 100 hz. My fps reads 60-70 when gpu oced. Still not sure the comparison of my monitor running at 100hz when the fps counter is 60-7, all i understand is even at 45-50 fps my monitor still feels like 100 hz. I know im being greedy as i want ultra settings, but even with a i8700 id need a 1080 ti gpu to do that. Still assassins creed runs with very high settings and only shadows low at 70fpr on 100 hz and i dont notice the dips. I tested my mates haswell i7 i forget its name but its the top one a k too and with my 1070 i did see a increase of anything around 10-30 fps depending on game, at the same time my gpu wasn't being bottlenecked on my i3770k. Im guessing the extra fps was due to the cpu, its improved architecture and its brute force.

 

[U6b36ef]

im on the edge of the same upgrade, mainly due to broken usb headers and a dodgy on-board network driver on mobo. My 1070 runs all games on my i7 3770 with anything from mostly medium to high graphics at 100hz monitor, x34 predator. Some older games like bf4 its just overkill. To be honest i play gta 45 with nearly full graphics but a few settings down to maintain a 100 hz. My fps reads 60-70 when gpu oced. Still not sure the comparison of my monitor running at 100hz when the fps counter is 60-7, all i understand is even at 45-50 fps my monitor still feels like 100 hz. I know im being greedy as i want ultra settings, but even with a i8700 id need a 1080 ti gpu to do that. Still assassins creed runs with very high settings and only shadows low at 70fpr on 100 hz and i dont notice the dips. I tested my mates haswell i7 i forget its name but its the top one a k too and with my 1070 i did see a increase of anything around 10-30 fps depending on game, at the same time my gpu wasn't being bottlenecked on my i3770k. Im guessing the extra fps was due to the cpu, its improved architecture and its brute force.

@ms288 also.

My specs
4790K
GTX 1080 Ti
1600Mhz ram. (Actually 1866Mhz, but no XMP profile available on motherboard, so locked at 1600MHz.)
Monitor: Acer g-sync, 27 inch, 1440p, 144Hz.
(I still think of 60fps as minimum frame rate though, in most games. Some games like Crysis 3 are smooth well down to 30 fps, without v-sync.)

I am actually struggling with bottlenecking on my system, for a reason that I can not work out. Bit of a long story so be patient.

Originally I had a 1080p monitor and a GTX 980, 4790K, 1600MHz RAM.

At 1080p the only bottleneck I thought was really the GTX 980 (in some games) if I wanted max settings. If I used Nvidia DSR at 1440p, something else came into play to cause a bottleneck. I never could work out what it was. Sometimes frame rate dropped even when CPU and GPU were not maxed out.

When I got a 1440p monitor and GTX 1080 TI, I tried playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. There were times when clearly the GPU and CPU were not maxing out. However I was seeing frame rate drops down to about 45 fps sometimes. I never worked out what was causing that, but assumed it was slow system RAM.

I have other games that do this. The Evil Within Two. Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

I checked to make sure my CPU was not just maxing out on one thread, while playing these. It was not. .. (An example where one thread was maxing, is in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, which also dips well under 60 fps.)



Anyway I bought a 8700K, and some 3000MHz RAM. However I have still not built that system yet. Just need to install OS on new system, and transfer files over, then up and running.

I'll let you know what the result is. If it cured my bottlenecking, that was not CPU or GPU related. However I am worried about games that utilise one core/thread more like Black Flag. Basically because single core performance of 8700K over 4790K, is only about 10%. Pretty poor performance improvement of single core, over four generations of CPU, if you ask me.