Worth the upgrade?

[jjcdfour]

Current build

• i5-4690K

• Asrock H970m pro4

• Kingston 16gb ddr3 1600Mhz Ram

• GTX 970

upgrade parts

• rizen 5 2600

• Asrock B450m-HDV

• corsair16gb DDR4 3000Mhz ram

Monitor

Acer 1920x1080 60hz

I will upgrade my GPU in the future but for now I'm only using a 1080p monitor.

Games I'll play

-Battlefield V -Seige -VR games in the future

I know right now bfv is the only thing that would benifit from this. I have a clan I play battlefield with regularly. I was actually thinking of buying a vr headset soon...

I'd like your thoughts on the build. Should I upgrade or sit on my build for now. Recommend alternatives?

 

[Darkbreeze]

I'd probably try to include an ATX motherboard rather than a micro-ATX motherboard, IF your case will support it. They simply make life a lot easier as they generally have more features and include additional fan headers, SATA ports/headers, PCI slots, USB ports, etc. etc.

Otherwise, yes, it will definitely offer a bump up in CPU performance. That GTX 970 is probably still pretty decent for 1080p, so I don't think I'd worry too much about replacing that unless you are noticing troubles running at the settings and resolution you prefer.

If you do upgrade, you'll want to go with at least a tier higher, being GTX 1070 or possibly 2060 when they are released.

 

[julienruc]

Since we're talking about games here I don't think this is a good upgrade for you.

For your convenience, see the benchmark comparison below:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-4690K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-2600/2432vs3955

Your i5 has a higher base clock speed than the R5 2600. Now, if you were to overclock both of them you'll achieve very similar clock speeds. Since the Ryzen chip is much more recent, you might have a slight increase in frames for some games but nothing crazy. For CPU-intensive games like Battlefield V, you will actually get better frames with your i5 because Intel chips have a superior single-core performance in comparison to AMD. AMD chips are usually better for multi-core and multi-threaded applications (so any other tasks you'll do on your PC will run smoother, but not necessarily your games).

In the meantime, I would rather suggest you get a new motherboard that'll allow you to overclock that i5 CPU of yours (not sure if yours can or can't). However, keep in mind that any motherboard you buy for your 4th-Gen CPU will not be compatible with any Intel CPU from 6th Gen or higher. So if you're thinking of fully upgrading your system, it might be worth to wait until you can afford something better like the Ryzen 5 2600X that can be overclocked up to 4.2Ghz, which will be much more worth it.

Again, I'm suggesting this because I'm keeping in mind that the priority here is for your games. In a different scenario or situation, I might suggest to go forward with the upgrade.

P.S: You might consider getting a better quality B450 board if you're going to overclock. The MSI B450 Tomahawk is currently one of the best price/quality ratio out there. The Gigabyte B450 Aorus Elite is also cheaper and still decent alternative.

Hope this helps, let me know of your thoughts.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Clock speeds are not comparable and are irrelevant because the Ryzen CPUs have much stronger multithreaded performance and there are very few games or applications anymore that don't take advantage of that unless you are running older versions or titles of games or applications.

PLUS, and perhaps more important, is the fact that going forward that is going to increase in importance across the board as more and more games are optimized for higher core count CPUs, as well as the fact that you have only one place to go with that Haswell platform which is to an i7-4790k (Or 4790) while the Ryzen platform is going to allow you to make CPU upgrades through AT LEAST 2021 which will include the newer Zen 2 based CPUs that almost certainly are going to surpass the single core performance of any Intel CPU from Kaby lake backwards on top of having better threaded performance due to the higher core and hyper thread counts.

I don't see that it's a problem at all and honestly there are a lot of other reasons as well such as a lack of fowards compatible BIOS support for newer graphics card architectures, or poor support, as we've seen in the past when manufacturers stop offering bios updates and are seeing currently on a lot of older systems trying to run 2000 series Nvidia cards.

I like the upgrade but I'd like it more if you were able to bide your time a bit as AMD is going to be releasing some new CPUs in the not too distant future, however upgrading now will still allow you to make a change to those CPUs at any future date if you decide you need to.

Good luck doing that if you're still stuck on Haswell/Z97.