Upgrade Path for PC

[20caxtell]

My current build I built quickly over the summer as soon as I had cash from my new job. Now realizing I made some easily made mistakes for new builders. I got a i5-8400 with a non overclockable board, paired with a GTX 1060 6GB and 16gb of 3200 MHz ram. I believed I got a 500w PSU maybe 550. 250gb SSD and 2TB harddrive. With thermaltake h15 case. What upgrade would best improve my setup? I was looking at getting new motherboard and i5-9600k but the 1060 isn’t the BEST card for what I’m doing. I’m playing AAA games and competitive shooters at 144hz on 1080p. I just want that extra boost in fps on games such as Escape from Tarkov, Dayz, Arma 3, Battlefield, Black Ops etc. please help me out with some thoughts. I’m hoping the AMD launch tomorrow at CES will also help. Sorry for the spelling and stuff I’m on my phone at the moment.

 

[lthampton]

Upgrading the CPU will be a nice addition, however if you are playing those AAA most are optimised for GPU, so thats gonna be your biggest upgrade. You can get a 1080TI or even a RTX2070 and you'll see a large increase in frames. I say go with the GPU then the CPU later.

 

[cryoburner]

The i5-8400 is still a rather good CPU, and I wouldn't bother upgrading it to a 9600K. See the overall performance gains when paired with a 1080 Ti in this review, for example (Scroll down for 1080p gaming results, and you can find the charts for the individual games on an earlier page)...

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_9600K/19.html

At 1080p, they only saw about a 3% performance improvement on average going from an 8400 to a 9600k, and not even 1% additional performance from overclocking it. Is that worth spending hundreds of dollars to replace your CPU, motherboard and cooler? Probably not. Your existing CPU is perfectly fine for gaming, and that money would undoubtedly be better put toward a graphics card upgrade, where you could see much more substantial performance gains in most titles. Will you see 144+fps in all games? No, but not even the fastest CPU and GPU on the market can manage that.