Upgrading from an i7 2600k

[complete_minger]

Hello everyone, I currently have a slightly aging 2600k setup. my specs are as follows: i7 2600k (stable and cool oc @4.5 ghz), 8GB crucial 1600 DDR3 RAM, Asus MAXIMUS IV GENE-Z/GEN3 motherboard, AMD Sapphire r9 290 Graphics card and an OCZ 750 watt PSU.

I have been very happy with this setup over the past 3 and a half years minus the graphics card which is a year old.

I am a casual gamer and occasional video/picture/sound editor, however I love gaming with every setting maxed out over a 1080p resolution with a bare minimum of 60 FPS. The problem is my current setup sometimes struggles in GTA V and call of duty advanced warfare is unplayable with ultra settings.

My friend just built a system with an i7 4790k cpu on the Z97 chipset, but he uses the r9 280x. when benchmarking open gl performance with the latest cinebench, he gets an extra 60 fps over my system even though my setup has a 290.

Looking at his benchmark with the slightly lesser card, my cpu is bottlenecking my card plus his system has pci express 3.0??

I have spoken to other people casually and they insist that my current i7 is not the problem but the benchmarks say otherwise when comparing with my friends newly built 4790k setup.

I can price both the 4790k and 5820k almost identically, so I guess my main question is: which should I go for? future proofing means a lot to me also.

Sorry if this has been asked multiple times but I have asked a few people and all have given me different answers.

I also read many 4790k vs 5820k threads on here and I am leaning towards the 5820k for future proofing.

 

[Robert Cook]

the 5820K is better in terms of power per price, and with six cores will last longer. but, those X99 motherboards are significantly more than the Z97 boards. also you would need DDR4 RAM which is also rather pricey. that bottle neck does not make that much sense, as it is still a strong ship, but I could see it starting to fall behind a bit. IF you can afford one, the X99 system is the way to go, but note it is an Intel extreme system, so it will probably not have that many up grade options down the road, save other extreme chips which are always going to be more expensive. (ex your CPU ... 3770, 770 4790... on Lga 1150, but only a few versions on LGA 2011, so LGA 2011-v3 will likely be the same.

 

[MystoPigz]

Well, the i7 4790K is a TEENY bit better than the i7 5820K. the 4790K has better single core performance and better overclocking capabilities with four cores. The 5820K has better overall performance with six cores. If you are playing games or running applications that use four cores, go for the 5820K. Otherwise, go for the 4790K. In your case, I would get the 5820K. Hope this helps!

 

[InvalidError]

Comparing benchmarks is a fine hobby but unless you are unhappy with your 2600k's performance in actual everyday use, there is no point in replacing it. You would likely be much better off waiting at least until Skylake's numbers come out later this year.

 

[Joseph DeGarmo]

Skylake (i7-6700k) will be quite an upgrade. It will support DDR4 memory.

 

[nikoli707]

you have driver issues. when the 2600k starts bottlenecking in games so will the 4970k. pcie 2.0 vs 3.0 is nothing so dont worry about that. there is absolutely no reason to upgrade your processor unless you will be going with an overclocked 6 core(skylake at this point), and even then it wont help you in any games, dx12 or not. something isn't right with your drivers.

 

[rcald2000]

I don't have an answer for your direct question, 4790K vs 5820k, as I've personally never overclocked either. I was recently pondering this same dilemma, but opted for a Xeon E5-26xx v3 Haswell-EP processor instead, because I couldn't resist the option to install up to 256 GB on my motherboard. But I noticed that you made a point about your friend's setup supporting PCIe 3.0; does that means that your motherboard only supports PCIe 2.0? In my mind, that would totally explain the FPS difference between the two machines. Below is an excerpt of an article I located from years ago. PCIe 2.0 actually has slightly less than one-half the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0, because 2.0 uses 8b/10b encoding, which means that 8 bits of data cost 10 bits to transmit, which means it loses 20 percent of it's theoretical bandwidth to overhead.

"So, an x8 connection with PCI Express 2.0 will have a bandwidth of 4 GB/s (500 MB/s x 8), while an x16 connection with PCI Express 2.0 will have a bandwidth of 8 GB/s (500 MB/s x 16). An x16 connection with PCI Express 3.0 will have a bandwidth of 16 GB/s (1 GB/s x 16)"

By the way, I remember the specs on the 2600/2600K very well. I remember drooling over the Dell XPS 8300 desktop about four years ago, but I ended up not getting it. Very respectable four core CPU. I'd be somewhat surprised if it was bottlenecking GTAV, but I could be wrong. It would be very simple for you to benchmark your CPU core and GPU during game play and find out for sure.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Wait for Skylake.

 

[Zircoben]

The advantage you'll get spending the money on a new motherboard, CPU, OS, etc. to upgrade to current gen processors is NOT worth it. I'd stick with your i7-2600K and see if drivers or patches to the game help.

 

[complete_minger]

Thank you all very much for all your input. I really appreciate it and I hope I can be of some use to others in the future. As few of you say, PCI express 2.0 is not bottlenecking things yet. However since my board is Gen 3 compatible and PCI express 3.0 compatible, upgrading to a 3770k would give me The faster PCI express lanes. I feel that buying a 3770k is throwing money away for little gain. My original intentions were to wait for the Skylake platform (I never realised it was supposed be available this year), but I kind of feel that chasing the dragon when it comes to technology is always a slight waste of time, but I could wait for it if its really worth it.

The weird thing is, battlefield 4 runs flawlessly and never dips below 65 FPS with every eye candy setting maxed out.

When running both GTA V and Advanced Warfare, The cpu never gets to 100% utilisation levels which makes things more confusing, hence me wondering if the old Z68 chipset is holding things back a little now.

 

[InvalidError]

When running both GTA V and Advanced Warfare, The cpu never gets to 100% utilisation levels which makes things more confusing, hence me wondering if the old Z68 chipset is holding things back a little now.

For CPU usage to reach 100% on a i7, you would need to keep all eight hardware threads busy continuously. I do not think there are any games well-threaded enough to get anywhere near that. Most have one or two threads doing the bulk of all processing, accounting for 60-90% of the game's total CPU usage, and then a bunch of small threads handling miscellaneous stuff - you can use Process Explorer to poke around and see how CPU usage is divided between process threads if your are curious.

As for the chipset, all the performance-critical components in modern PCs (GPU and RAM) are connected directly to the CPU. The motherboard has negligible influence on performance aside from USB/SATA IO performance, BIOS parameters and base clock accuracy.

 

[complete_minger]

Well guys, I discovered the problem with advanced warfare!! I had super sampling ramped up not knowing what it did. I read in to what super sampling actually does, so I turned super sampling off and I now get a minimum fps of 90.

Thanks again for all your input

 

[paradoxnrt]

It's now July 2016, and I'm still running my 2600k (overclocked with water cooler). I have no issues with it in gaming = I can't justify a new CPU/Board/RAM at this time.....and I've had this CPU since 2011!!!!

It seems like programming has a ways to go before catching up to Intel's i7 series. Sure, Intel keeps coming out with marginally faster i7 CPUs to try and get new sales....but my 2600K still has plenty of power to handle any game!

That said, I have upgraded my GPU several times since 2011! I generally upgrade the GPU once ever 1 1/2 years.