Wondering if you should upgrade your CPU for gaming? Read this.

[atomicWAR]

I see dozens of posts everyday where folks ask if they should get a new CPU for gaming even though theirs is only a gen or two old. Especially those folks on 1440P or 4K. Some people mistakenly think running higher resolutions need more CPU horse power. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the more you crank up your resolution and eye candy the less CPU horse power you need, not including 100-144hz setups. I saw a great article on Anandtech about the new Kabylake X parts. They were nice enough to throw in the new CPUs by AMD and Intel but also included an old i7 2600K. If you glance through the games you'll see that the i7 2600K keeps up and even beats the newest CPUs out there at 4K and sometimes even 1080P in some cases.

http://anandtech.com/show/11549/the-intel-kaby-lake-x-i7-7740x-and-i5-7640x-review-the-new-single-thread-champion-oc-to-5ghz/11

The short of it is CPUs are good for gaming much longer then most people realize as long as they have 4C/8T or more and 60-90FPS is all your aiming for. This is also assuming your CPU was a good gaming CPU to begin with (cough not a AMD bulldozer or derivative...so yeah Intel CPUs basically from the last 7 gens).

 

[Barty1884]

......provided they were "good for gaming" to begin with?

ie, running an FX4300.... or 9590 would *technically* meet the 4C/8T requirement of your end statement, but you'd be hard pressed to quantify them as overly relevant today.

Interesting they only cherry pick the best i7 of past generations to compare with the modern KabyLake or Ryzen offerings. I don't see too many questions of people with higher end chips looking to upgrade.... more like people on 2nd gen i5's, FX chips and the like. Those would be more interesting to see in results IMO.

 

[atomicWAR]

I see a fair number of sandybridge (or later) upgrade questions but as you stated most are i5s with the occasional i7 sprinkled in there. I just thought i was an interesting read. And yes I should have qualified my statement that your CPU had to be good to game on to begin with. AMD really dropped the ball with bulldozer. I'll fix my end statement.