Upgrade to Skylake or stay at I5 2500K ?

[the_bears]

Hey guys, I was wondering should I upgrade to Skylake from my I5 2500K? I have seen some threads where even an overclocked I5 2500K @4.0 is showing bottlenecks with a GTX 980Ti, even though I will have Fury, I'm wondering that it will also bottleneck it, I plan on overclocking my CPU to 4.5 if it will not have bottlenecks.

 

[hoangps]

980Ti is a monster. It cannot be killed. Stay away from it! Save your CPU!

 

[guanyu210379]

Assuming you are not yet on GTX980Ti,
Here is the deal, run the games, which you think than your processor has already bottlenecking. During the game, try to control the processor load and the GPU load, assuming you have enough RAM.
If only the GPU runs 100% all the time but the game still runs on low fps, you need only the new GPU.
If only the processor runs 100% all the time but the game still runs on low fps, you need only the new processor.
If both the processor and GPU runs 100% all the time but the game still runs on low fps, you need a fully new rig.

assuming you are already on GTX980Ti.
If you see low fps on 1080p or 1440p, just replace the proc without further thinking.

 

[13thmonkey]

what exactly is the concern about bottlenecks? They will always exist. In every system in every mode of operation there will be a bottleneck. Period.

a 2500K and a 980ti, will be reasonably well matched.

 

[the_bears]

I wont have GTX 980 Ti , I have Fury.

 

[maddogfargo]

I wont have GTX 980 Ti , I have Fury.

Fury performance falls between a 980 and 980ti.

A single i5 2500k @ 4.0GHz 'probably' won't bottleneck a siingle Fury if you game at up to 1440p @ 60 FPS. If it does, it will be minimal. But your platform is aging, so I would upgrade your board and CPU after Skylake comes out. Just wait a bit for the initial rush to die down and prices to drop a little.

 

[the_bears]

Well I dont know will prices go down since I live in Europe and we rarely see that.

 

[guanyu210379]

Price drops do reach us in Europe...just quite a lot later LoL..and the drop is not as much as in USA. LoL

 

[the_bears]

So should I upgrade to Skylake or even Haswell or stay @ 2500K ?

 

[guanyu210379]

At the moment, I think you should stay with your 2500k.
Oc it if you want

 

[Matthew Salmon]

A nice upgrade for you would be an i7 3770k - as it would mean not having to dismantle your system and purchase a new motherboard. Remember to upgrade your motherboard bios before removing the 2500k.

Bear in mind if you are running a 4yr old P67 or Z68 system then you may not have PCI-E 3.0 - in which case I would not recommend buying a 980TI. I would also not recommend this card unless you have at least a 1440p monitor @120Hz otherwise you wont be able to see any difference. For example if you own a 1080p 60Hz monitor its not worth getting more than an NVidia 660Ti / 770 - as this card will get good fps at 1080p in almost every game.

 

[Ryan_30]

With a good cooler, like the corsair H55. You should be able to get 4.7ghz stable out of an I5-2500k. The other thing I would do is make sure you are running your games off an SSD and your system has 8gb+ of ram. Preferably 16gb.

The ideal setup is multiple ssd's. Put your OS on one SSD by itself, and your games on another, or even have your games on an SSD raid. Removing HDD access times from the bottleneck equation will allow your CPU to do more work and less loading.

I see a lot of CPU bottlenecks that are actually HDD bottlenecks and bad game code. E.g. the game has some code loading a file off the disk that is thread locking the thread, it takes X time for this file to be read from disk and opened... And then due to newer games having 100's of thousands of small little files it's accessing all the time and seek times on mechanical drives... The cpu spikes to 100% and it's really choking on the HDD performance.

Put two SSD's in a RAID 0 and put all your games on that RAID, and put your OS on it's own drive, and then IMO, an OC'd 2500-k should have no problem loading a 980-TI.

It doesn't even cost that much to do. You can get 3 * 250gb crucial SSD's right now on newegg for $90 a piece. 1 for the OS, 2 for the Raid.