Upgrade to i7 or just buy more RAM

Aaron Miller

Honorable
Dec 27, 2014
13
0
10,510
Hi so a few months back I upgraded my CPU to an i5 6500 with 8gb of RAM and it did increase the quality of games greatly from my old CPU but it still struggles with games like H1Z1 and now Battlegrounds. Now I know both of these games aren't completely optimized but I feel like I should be able to play them both on higher than medium settings at least. Even The Witcher 3 struggles to run on high settings. So yeah basically I'm just curious if I should just upgrade to an i7 or just buy more RAM or if there is anything you know of that could improve my PC I'd love to hear it. Also I have the CPU paired with a 1070
 
Solution
Your i5 6500 isn't the fastest out there but at 3.2 GHz it shouldn't bottleneck your graphics card much. The 8 GB of RAM is sufficient but would be better for gaming at 16 GB.

If you have the money to do so, then a I5 6600K or I7 6700K, would definitely improve matters.

Your i5 6500 isn't the fastest out there but at 3.2 GHz it shouldn't bottleneck your graphics card much. The 8 GB of RAM is sufficient but would be better for gaming at 16 GB.

If you have the money to do so, then a I5 6600K or I7 6700K, would definitely improve matters.

 
Solution
A CPU upgrade would be your best bet. Just sold my i5 6500, though I'm using a GTX 970 in this HTPC build. I went to an i5 7600k, but rather surprised to see how much faster the 7700k is in encoding and games that can utilize hyperthreading in the i7. This is the case even with both CPUs at same OC frequencies. I don't think going to 16GB is needed for now, unless you're gaming at 4k then it makes more sense.