Question Upgrading 9th gen CPUs...

[wbankard]

Buying a Dell Gaming desktop with a 9th gen I-5... Can I upgrade the CPU to a I-7 or greater later on... Do not want to pay the extream premium for it from Dell. Yea I know I should build one but ... The next problem is updating the BIOS for the chip...

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  9th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 9400 (6-Core, 9MB Cache, up to 4.1GHz with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology)
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  Windows 10 Home 64bit English
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  NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2060 Ti 6GB GDDR6
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  8GB DDR4 at 2666MHz
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  128GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage)
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  Ports & Slots

 

[NightHawkRMX]

You should be able to upgrade the CPU to any 9th gen CPU, including I7s and I9s, unless Dell put extra restrictions on the motherboard.

 

[InvalidError]

When will you be upgrading to an i7/i9 CPU? At the very slow rate older i5/i7 prices have been falling despite Ryzen crushing them in overall performance which should be pounding older CPUs' resale value into the ground just like it is doing with 1-2 years older iterations of itself, it may be 5+ years before you can get somewhat reasonably priced i7/i9 to replace the i5 with. By then, it is likely you'll also want DDR5, PCIe5.0x4 NVMe, USB4 and whatever else got a significant refresh. AMD is almost certain to double core counts at some point between now and 5nm+ and you will probably be looking at $200-250 used 8c16t i9-9900k vs $200 new 12c24t Ryzen 6600.