[SOLVED] Upgrade a 9700k to a 9900k / kf - worth it?

James Blonde

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My current system has a stock 9700k cooled with a Corsair h115i water cooler, on an Aorus Elite Z390 board, 64gb corsair ddr4 3200 cl16 ram in 4 slots, 1000w corsair PSU, and 2 x 1tb M2 SSDs, and 2 high capacity hard drives, in a Define R6 case, and a newly purchased Aorus 3070ti.

I use the system for a mix of what seem to be CPU bound sim / strategy games (cities skylines, transport fever 2), likely to play red dead 2 at some point (just haven't got around to it yet!) and doing photography editing (photoshop plus plug ins, lightroom, few other photo slanted graphics packages) , and starting to move into video editing (Davinci Resolve r17 full version). Also for day to day work.

Frame rates on my games aren't great in late game set ups with high populations - think both these games are known for performance problems. Obviously my 3070ti has made no difference - wasn't really expecting it to, but hey, you can live in hope! 😂

Given a 9900k (or a 9900kf???) can be bought for around £300, would this be a worthwhile way to get a bit of boosted performance for CPU bound tasks and moving into video production??

Or would I be better off doing something else?? If so, what?
 
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Let your experience with Davinci resolve be your guide.
Here are the recommendations:

I note that the graphics card is the most important component, and you seem to have that well in hand.
I7-9700K would seem to be a good fit.
If you have not overclocked the 9700K, most will allow 5.0 or thereabouts.
https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics
What you get with a i9-9900k is 8 extra threads, but no significant improvement in single thread performance.
If you want to do better, you are looking at a 11th gen intel or ryzen 5000 system as well as a new motherboard.
Your current i7-9700k has 8 threads and a passmark rating of 14585. That is when...

James Blonde

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Anyone?

Aware there are questions all over the Internet covering this, but those seem to exclusively deal with AAA gaming and overclocking performance rather than stock, and graphics / video as much as processor intensive gaming
 

InvalidError

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Having SMT gives you 30-40% extra performance at best in heavily threaded scenarios, less and sometimes even slightly negative performance change in some other situations.

Unless you can upgrade for a minimal net cost, I wouldn't bother unless what you do can really leverage the extra threads.

If you think you may need more than 30% extra performance to get where you want to be, the next major step up would be a Ryzen 5900X or waiting for Alder Lake i7s..
 
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James Blonde

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Thanks @InvalidError - yep trying to avoid the disruption and expense that would come with a new motherboard and get the best performance I can out of my existing system given I seem to have incrementally upgraded everything else! Not that a new processor isn't disruptive... 😂

30-40% strikes me as a pretty decent potential performance improvement! Obviously less than 0, not so much. Looks like resolve does benefit from hyperthreading, so I guess the question is, how invested in video am I likely to get? Though even then, there doesn't seem to be that much in it.

So perhaps not then. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and look at overclocking for the first time....
 
Let your experience with Davinci resolve be your guide.
Here are the recommendations:

I note that the graphics card is the most important component, and you seem to have that well in hand.
I7-9700K would seem to be a good fit.
If you have not overclocked the 9700K, most will allow 5.0 or thereabouts.
https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics
What you get with a i9-9900k is 8 extra threads, but no significant improvement in single thread performance.
If you want to do better, you are looking at a 11th gen intel or ryzen 5000 system as well as a new motherboard.
Your current i7-9700k has 8 threads and a passmark rating of 14585. That is when all 8 threads are 100% busy. The single thread rating is 2912.
A i9-9900K has 16 threads and a rating of 18905/3001.
Worth it only if you can keep all threads busy.

A more modern i7-11700K also has 16 threads and a rating of 26044/3573.
A similar ryzen r6-5800X has 16 threads and a rating of 28624/3506.

Ryzen is very sensitive to ram.
Your 64gb of ram is likely to work fine on intel, but on ryzen, verify that the ram kit is explicitly
supported on the ryzen cpu/mobo combo.
 
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James Blonde

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I've been team blue for a long time, but struggle to see a compelling reason to move to an 11th gen processor and motherboard when 12th gen might be just around the corner and would almost certainly require a complete upgrade anyway. And if it turns out Ryzen is better than 12th gen, well I'd be doing a full system upgrade then anyway. And I'd be in at the start of a new architectural cycle where later component upgrades might be worth it, rather than the end of the cycle with the 9th gen / z390 / LGA1151

Will check my ram out on amd anyway, just to be sure!
 
Both intel and amd have upgraded hardware on the horizon.
Intel 12th gen cpu will need a new chipset motherboard as well as possibly ddr5 ram.
Time frame is the end of this year.
AMD is scheduled for early next hear and will also need a new motherboard and possibly ddr5 ram.
Only rumors and leaks on performance improvements.
There is always something better coming in the future.
If you wait, you will wait forever.
The cycle seems to be about two years.
If you have a need now, go ahead and buy now.
If you can wait a bit, I would wait.
 
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On this occasion, I can wait 🙂. If there was a cheapish, quick fix that could buy me a bit of time, I'd take it, but doesn't look to be the case here.
Do you have a side monitor?
If you can, keep task monitor open to the performance tab while you go about your work.
Select to view logical processors.
You will get a better understanding of what the processors are doing.
 
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