Upgrade from 2500k which CPU?

[jonathan.curran]

Hi All,

Today my old z68 motherboard with an i5 2500k finally packed in - i had to flash a new BIOS to handle the 1060 GPU upgrade, all worked fine but today the BIOS is in an endless loop and it can't seem to recover from the secondary BIOS.

So - I was thinking of getting a new CPU, motherboard and RAM combo. What do people think is the best equivalent purchase? Not looking to spend too much cash as this just started as a GPU upgrade - probably in the £300-400 region all in. Coffee lake looks tempting, but not sure about the high prices and TDP - Ryzen interests me but not sure.

any help?

 

[Darkbreeze]

What is your primary, and any important secondary, use of this system?

 

[jonathan.curran]

i do the odd bit of gaming here and there (hence the recent upgrade to the 1060), but in general other than that it's just internet browsing, tv streaming etc.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Then pretty much ANY Ryzen 5 or 7, or Intel Coffee lake i3-i7 CPU would do you fine. Right now the best performance per dollar upgrade is the Intel i5-8400 with six cores that run at an ALL core speed of 3.8Ghz regardless that it's paper spec says 2.8Ghz it has been shown to never run below 3.5Ghz if there is ANY load present. Currently this is probably the best overall investment due to it's performance vs price but since there are no budget chipset motherboards available yet for Coffee lake the Z series motherboards and insane cost of RAM currently make it harder to swallow.

Ryzen isn't a whole lot better though considering that right now the need for new DDR4 memory on ANY upgrade from the last two Intel generations (The last 3 really) or the current AMD generation makes for very few reasonably priced upgrades.

You might simply be better off for now by finding a suitable replacement board for your current CPU unless your heart (And wallet) is really into making the upgrade. If so, I'd be happy to make a recommendation but it's not going to be possible with either AMD or Intel to get into anything at all for less than four or five hundred dollars US unless you are ok with less than 16GB of memory, which I wouldn't really recommend since a lot of games are beginning to show signs of issues or an actual requirement higher quantities of memory.

 

[jonathan.curran]

thanks for the advice - much appreciated! my first thought was to just get a replacement board as i (very annoyingly) just upgraded to 16gb ddr3 which would now also be obsolete. only problem was that i can't seem to find any z68s for a decent price on eBay/anwhere else.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Z68, Z75 and Z77 should all be compatible chipsets, for overclocking, while B65, B75, H55, H61, H67, H77 P67, Q67 and Q77 should all be compatible for non-overclocking use. Since ALL of these are quite outdated, any remaining new boards are likely to mostly be New old stock and since remaining stock is limited, prices will be higher than actual valuation but they know people like you will pay more for them because it still means paying less than a full upgrade.

That being said, your best bet, after looking around to see if you might find a deal on a new old stock board is to find a used board in good shape. Ebay of course is a good source for that but you'll want to limit purchases to sellers with high numbers of sales and good reputations. Also, any of these would be options of one sort or another but you'll need to put in a little legwork to determine what is risky or not risky and what will actually work for you. I always advise buying new or upgrading if the cost is more than half of what you'd need to invest, but I fully understand needing to stay within budgetary constraints as well.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR11.TRC1.A0.H0.Xz77+motherboard.TRS0&_nkw=z77+motherboard&_sacat=0