Worth it to go to 4970k from 2500k?

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airhoodz

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Jun 26, 2014
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Hello!

I'm currently on a 2500k running at 4.5 and my PC occasionally fails to OC. I'm thinking about upgrading to a new z97 mobo, new 850 PSU and going up to the 4970k.

I have a 290 and I can see some bottle necking in games like WoW, and occasionally I'm getting some odd crashes watching videos on the second monitor while playing a game on the main.

Is it worth it to go to a Haswell chip this late or should I wait for Broadwell?
 
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The upgrade you just listed would be great and work for a long while but if you can afford broadwell when it comes out then you should wait for it. Then again, if you can't stand to wait for it this upgrade is great.
 
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It is not late. The main improvement from Haswell to Broadwell chips is on the GPU performance. The CPU side had minor improvements. Because you don't need the built-in GPU Intel HD Graphics, you will be fine with the Haswell architecture.
Processor of Haswell production are cheaper nowadays and you will notice a better office/daily tasks productivity, gaming experience and lower power consumption (lower temperatures).
 
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For gaming (unless you do other multithreaded tasks) an i7 won't gain you much if anything over an i5 4690k for the extra money. Broadwell may or may not even reach the desktop, they can't make up their minds. Latest speculations I've seen made said if broadwell makes it to desktop it will be for the lga 2011 haswell-e's (6-8 core i7's) not lga 1150 (i5's and 4core i7's). Skylake is going to be the next cpu for desktops across the board since it's releasing right around the same time as broadwell for desktops but will be on yet another socket (not 1150). How much of an improvement it will be, not sure. Doubt it will be major. Ivy bridge wasn't that big of a boost over sandy bridge, haswell offered a little more power savings and a die shrink with a very slight performance bump but again nothing major over sandy bridge - so I don't expect anything different with skylake. Most of the features will be things like integration for dragon voice interaction, power savings etc and a smaller die. The only saving grace they may have for overclocking on such a small die (14nm) is moving the internal voltage regulators off the die. In terms of gaming, I don't see your current cpu being a real restriction.
 
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It's definitely bottle necking my 290. I'm getting like 30-40FPS in raids. I use a pretty heavy UI, and I stream. I watch movies while playing too, an even when I listen to music on plug.dj plug lags pretty bad.

I've been debating going with the 4690k though. I'm also a computer science major working on a masters so I do some heavy lifting on it, and I also run a lot of excel sheets and reports for my work on my desktop.
 
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I don't really buy that, the benchmarks are almost double from the 2500k to the 4970k, and like I said sometimes I have to reboot 4-5 times to get it to boot on OC. It isn't really stable and I think it's on the end of it's life.

Plus it's forcing me to upgrade my old PSU that's about 4 years old, upgrade to water cooling(picking up a prebuilt loop) and get a new MOBO/CPU.
 
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If you're wanting to upgrade, it's not like you'll be losing performance. If I had a 2500k currently then I wouldn't be too bothered with it. Not sure if it's your cpu or motherboard or bios causing your random oc issues, could be any of the three. I finally upgraded to the 4690k but for me it was a huge performance increase coming from a c2d e8400. I haven't seen any gaming benchmarks that suggest the i7 getting double the performance, I've looked at quite a few bench's for games and the increase is only around 10fps at best. That's not taking into account performance in other programs.

I'd say if you're watching movies and playing a game and listening to itunes and whatever all else at the same time, then the extra threads of an i7 would suit your situation better. I don't run into those problems much since I'm old and can only watch one thing at a time lmao. In that case I'd also recommend considering 16gb of ram for that level of multitasking.

I can't say for sure, but it seems like a few folks have had odd issues when oc'ing their i7's. I don't own one and haven't tried to oc it personally and I've also heard of people with good success. Might be something to check into if overclocking is one of your goals.
 
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I have 20 GB of RAM. 1666 too.

I think it's a mixture of the Mobo and the CPU. I'm definitely getting limited though. With the 290 I'm only getting 30-50 fps in raids on mythic and sometimes I get bad drops down to like 25 steady.

That isn't really acceptable while playing. Especially when trying to stream. The stream is coming across really poorly.
 
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Totally worth it, in my opinion you should go for it., I'm was very happy when I upgraded from a 3570k to 4790k...
I suggest you get a ROG Motherboard if it's within your budget.

 
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Here's a link to a discussion on it including someone who upgraded and didn't feel it was worth it (they have actual experience, I'm just speculating).

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1334701-Upgrading-i5-2500K-Worth-it-or-not

Here's a discussion (similar) that says the extra threads are worth it for streaming. I don't stream personally so I can't say for sure.

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/281999-3570k-to-4970k-worth-it/

If nothing else at this point, given skylake is only a few months away if you can hold out a tad longer you might wait to see what those i7's bring.
 
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If it were just going from 2500k to 4690k you're right but the op is talking about the 4970k which is a hyperthreaded i7. Single core performance would still be pretty similar, some of the haswell i7's have overclocking hurdles which could hurt if the 2500k they have is a good overclocker. The 10-15% (maybe 20% at best) performance boost from the hyperthreading may improve their experience when streaming. Still not sure if that little bit of gain is going to be significant enough (without going to x99 and a 6 or 8 core i7) is going to be worth the investment. I'd be highly irritated if I spent close to $500 usd to upgrade and only got 5-10fps increase.
 
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You know that hyperthreading means nothing when it comes to games, even today with 8 core CPUs out there in consoles, hyperthreading does not increase FPS in video games, so it equals wasting your money for something you won't need, and by the time hyperthreading becomes a thing in video games, these CPUs will be all obsolete, going from 2500k to any other CPU out there for gaming at this time is exactly wasting your money for let's say 5 more frames per second, which is easily negligible, I have an i5 4670k, my uncle has i5 2500k and well we never noticed any difference side by side with the same graphics card, even in the most CPU intensive and demanding games like Rome Total War 2... but it is his money, at the end of day, he has to make the decision
 
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Hyper threading + More and faster cache, + Improved IPC + Improved chip set = Significant avg and min fps improvements in games like BF4 Multiplayer & Crysis 3 to give you a couple games. When paired with a powerful graphics or powerful SLI / Crossfire Configuration.

 
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AC UNITY NEW GAME: Ubisoft Recommends an I7 found a video to illustrate why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKzJE0Z-XFk

Below taken from the Nvidia performance guide They recommend a OC for the game game both cpu and gpu

If you need extra performance, overclocking your GPU with an app like MSI Afterburner is an excellent start, but you'll also want to overclock your CPU to give Unity's city simulation even more power to play with. For that, Google your CPU name and motherboard model to bring up hundreds of system-specific

This is what is happening with new games...
 
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Well, to tell you the truth I have not seen anything like that up to now, it may improve your performance by something like 5 FPS in a couple of games, but the whole idea is still moot and it is not worth spending that much either...I can provide you with as many benchmarks as you want to see how futile it is for a gaming rig, even in games like Rome Total war 2... so?
 
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AC:Unity... well what can one say about this game? you know they launched the game with loads of bugs, we are yet to see how the game performs after 6 insane patches released for the game, a lot of games recommend i7 for their games, but benchmarks say something else... They trick people to upgrade, but only fools will comply, these game developers have contracts with hardware manufactures, google it and you will find more
 
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well I don't get the reason why people try to overlook reality, just to justify their ideas based on what they have heard, you have either been far from gaming world for too long or you don't want to see how things work these days, and well you see that all people disagreed with you and in the end you were the one who was supposed to be convinced
and thanks for the chart, it shows you how irrelevant is hyper-threading when it comes to gaming
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-6.html
evil within was supposed to benefit from i7-4770k but it did not, metal gear revengeance recommended an i7-3770k but it was really irrelevant in that game too, wolfenstein new order recommended the i7 but funny that was ridiculous too... I don't know why you resist, you know that you are mistaken, and you had admitted that too, but again you are back contending things which are absolutely non-existent
can you please give us another benchmark except for that AC:Unity thing that i7 makes a dramatic change? not to mention AC: Unity was not an exception, but a poorly optimized game
 
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look here
1.Evil within needed i7-4770k to run well...reality is http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2403976
2.watch dogs which needed i7-4770k again... http://www.techspot.com/review/827-watch-dogs-benchmarks/page5.html
3.somewhere you mentioned battlefield 4 here http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html
4. Crysis 3 is the thing? http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-performance/page6.html ( the difference between i5 3470 and i7-3770k is only 4fps and the i5 is not even 3570k)
An i7 doesn't offer much extra gaming performance and if anything negligable, mostlikely caused due to their faster clock speed.
 
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