[SOLVED] Upgrade i5 2500 (Non-K) for Gaming PC?

[TonicBumpkin]

Hi All

Is it worth upgrading my i5 2500 (locked version) in your opinion? I've seen much talk about skylake but read that not many people think its worth it!

Would you recommend maybe getting a 2nd hand unlocked (K) i5 or i7 1155 chip from ebay instead and overclocking it? If so what chip?

Any feedback would be helpful!

Thanks

 

[Karsten75]

I have a PC (not my main use one) with an i5-2500 processor. I don't think it's worth upgrading to anything earlier than SKylake.

As things stand now, I am still on the fence on an upgrade to the currently available Skylake processors. I can't find a specific use case that justifies the cost involved in upgrading that PC to a newer platform. I'd be interested to know why you want to upgrade?

 

[TonicBumpkin]

I have a PC (not my main use one) with an i5-2500 processor. I don't think it's worth upgrading to anything earlier than SKylake.

As things stand now, I am still on the fence on an upgrade to the currently available Skylake processors. I can't find a specific use case that justifies the cost involved in upgrading that PC to a newer platform. I'd be interested to know why you want to upgrade?

I've come into a bit of extra money from the taxman as they taxed me too much for the last year basically . With a few new games coming out later this year I've identified that the CPU is the weakest part of my current build, CPU is probs now 3-4 years old maybe?

So the thought of upgrading crossed my mind due to the release of Skylake really!

Intel Core i5 2500
8GB Corsair Dominator RAM
GTX 760 2GB
300GB SSD
1TB HDD

 

[Karsten75]

You could probably get better performance upgrading the graphics card to a newer 900-series card and leaving the processor as-is.

Even though I'm tempted to upgrade mine, I thought I'd wait a few months toll there are more user experiences. For now I think those old Sandy Bridge processors still pack a considerable punch.

 

[Malachai80]

It depends what you want to do with your PC

I have a i5 2500 myself and an upgrade to an i7 3770k (which I bought used) was totally worth it

I got my hands on a nearly unused gainward phantom gtx 770 really cheap price. At this time I played mainly Battlefield 4 with my former asus gtx 560 ti at medium to high settings. With the gtx I could improve the settings to high to ultra.
I monitored the usage of the cpu and when I played BF4 Multiplayer (which is known to be processor intensive) my cpy was most of the time at 100% usage. In other words: I could not use all of the possible performance of my gtx 770.

I upgraded to an i7 3770k an the load of the cpu went down to 60-70% in BF4 Multiplayer.

I think the i5 2500 was close at fully usingt the gtx 770 because the 3dmark scores are pretty close at fire strike:
i5 2500 + gtx 560 ti: 3252 points
i5 2500 + gtx 770: 6905 points
i7 3770 + gtx 770: 7367 points

A couple of weeks I bought a second gtx 770 for 120€ and use them in SLI mode and the i7 has no problem to handle it. The i5 would have been to weak at least in processor intensive games as mentioned. In addition I overclocked it to 4.3 ghz in turbo mode
i7 3770 + 2x gtx 770: 12042 points


conclusion:
1) yes, you can buy a graphiccard 970 and up and yes it will be an improvement, but you will not fully use its processing power due the bottleneck of your processor regarding to the games you play or programs you use

2) if you change your processor to a K and overclock you will see only a little improvement in games and a big in processor intensive tasks

3) if you get your hands on an i7 3770k and overclock it, you have enough power for gtx 980 ti in SLI mode so you can take the money you save on a new motherboard and price difference of a used 3770k to a new skylake k cpu (although thats not too much) and add it to your graphic cards budget

by the way, i use my i5 2500 again with a 750 as steam machine, which can do nearly any game running on steam os, still a good cpu

 

[jaguarskx]

If playing games is the primary purpose of your PC, then the i5-2500 CPU is still fine. See following CPU game benchmarks from Techspot. The i5-2500k is in the benchmarks, but since it is not overclocked it performs the same as the i5-2500. For some strange reason Techspot decided to include the old i5-2500k as part of the benchmarks back in April 2015. Note that the benchmarks for Batman: Arkham Knight was before Warner Brothers pulled the game due to a lot of people complaining about severe performance issues. I think the game was re-released in September.

Source:
http://www.techspot.com/features/gaming/gaming-benchmarks/




http://www.techspot.com/review/1022-batman-arkham-knight-benchmarks/page7.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/1000-project-cars-benchmarks/page5.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/1006-the-witcher-3-benchmarks/page5.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/991-gta-5-pc-benchmarks/page6.html