X4 760K to i5-4460. A serious upgrade?

[forceuser98]

I am currently running a pretty terrible AMD X4 760K CPU. I am wanting to upgrade my CPU and am eyeing the i5-4460. Would this be a upgrade worth buying or would I be in much better water by spending $100 more for a i7-4770? Any answers appreciated.

 

[Gam3r01]

I would take the mid ground with a 4690k.
Any of those would still be a substantial upgrade over the 760K

 

[dark_lord69]

yeah, worth buying, should be a big difference for you!

 

[jaguarskx]

Yes, you will notice a rather large difference in performance especially since the Athlon II X4 760k is basically a Richland generation AMD APU (less powerful than FX series) without a graphics core. I recently had discussion about Fallout 4 and it's use of an update Creation Engine which was designed for Skyrim. The chart below is rather dated, but you can see the performance difference between Intel CPUs and AMD's APUs / CPUs.

http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html

 

[jaguarskx]

I forgot to mention...

Do not get Core i7 CPU it is not worth the money if you are playing games. The difference between the Core i5 and Core i7 is basically Hyper Threading (HT). Games really do not take advantage of HT, the chart above shows that where the marginally faster Core i7-2600k (3.4Gz) does not perform much better than the Core i5-2500k (3.3GHz).

The difference of 3 FPS can be chalked up to a combination of the extra 100MHz and more importantly variances that can happen when playing any type of game since you cannot exactly duplicate every single move and every single encounter the same exact way. HT can be a small part of that too since HT allows for background Windows processes to be handled more efficiently.

 

[photonboy]

BUDGET:
The i3-4160 or similar is another very good choice depending on your budget. It can perform similar to an i5/i7 in most games.

The $100 difference might be better spent on a different graphics card. I'd get the i3-4160 for a scenario like this:

i3-4160 + GTX970
vs
i5-4690K + GTX960

Also, keep in mind it's not just a new CPU but also a new copy of WINDOWS and a motherboard so even with the i3-4160 that's a minimum of about $300. If you need a half decent GPU that's at least $200 more (USA pricing).

DX12:
It's worth mentioning, but future games may greatly minimize the amount of CPU processing required. It does this two way:
1) more efficient coding, and
2) can use more cores/threads

DX12 gaming won't be common but then the i3-4160 is doing pretty well so far so it's something to think about, again BUDGET being the biggest factor. I have disabled HALF my cores of my i7-3770K (comparable to an i3-4160) and discovered very little difference in most games.