Hello Peeps, Just wondered what your thoughts are on upgrading my current rig to a new i5 6600K with an Asus Maximus Hero Alpha and 16GB of fast DDR4? Will I see much of an improvement? All I will be doing is overclocking it and gaming.... I will also be upgrading the graphics card but i'm waiting on Pascal, just wondering how much of a benefit a new motherboard/cpu will be.
Depends what you play. Id say your mainly gpu limited especially in none crossfire friendly games. Personally id hold off with the cpu/motherboard update. Also what res do you game at makes a difference.
On page 7 of Skylake review an i7 2600K @ same clocks as i7 6700K is max losing 10% average FPS for Alien Isolation. Min FPS is only 2 frames behind, Bioshock is close min & aver. FPS. AFAIK in most cases an i5 doesn't lose ground to an i7 in gaming, so I'd think those graphs are indicative of what your 2500K would perform like compared to a Skylake setup. AFAIK 16GB for gaming won't gain you anything over 8GB currently, also the graph on page 7 would represent Sandy+DDR3 vs Skylake+DDR4. Shame there aren't some more games benchmarked in review. Personally I'd think your better off using your budget for Skylake upgrade for GPUs upgrade instead. Which dunno if you need currently/perhaps? you have 2x 7970 (in sig) which is basically 2x 280X, what res do you game at?
To be honest it's not about what I play at the moment its about what I will be playing in the near future. Currently I play at 1080p but I will be upgrading to 4k in the near future and I will be purchasing a VR headset at some point so I want to make sure i'm ready for it. I have the money avaliable now so Id rather do it sooner than later as the Mrs will certainly find something else for me to spend the money on otherwise. I have been out of the hardware scene for a little while so i'm not so clued up on performances of hardware anymore and was really intrigued by how much quicker the 6600K is over the 2500K.
To be honest its only one 7970 I didn't realize I hadn't changed my SIG, but I will be upgrading my GFX anyway as soon as PASCAL is released. I have the money avaliable now to upgrade my whole system which is why i'm asking about the benefits of doing it now. As I said in the other post my Mrs will certainly find a way for me to spend the money on something for the house if I don't do it soon haha.
I went from an I5 2500k, to 4650k, to 4790k - the difference in overall percieved performance over the upgrades has been MARGINAL. The 2500k is still pulling its weight as a backup/OTG machine and I've had buyers remorse since the move to the 4650k. Personally I would wait for ground shattering performance overhauls and just focus on getting the most out of your GPU purchase instead.
Dump all the money into Gold Boullion, paint it grey, tell her its some lead for paper weight manufacturing. "Dunno nuffin about no money for a new sofa"... And then when Pascal's released flog it all back and buy away.
Bit late to the party, but the 2500K overclocked to >4GHz is still as quick as anything else on the market for gaming. I reckon only once we start to see games requiring octo-core CPUs for optimal performance will this chip consider moving to Benidorm and retiring in the sun. GPU all the way baby.
Already done .... Recently picked up a Used - Like New (damage boxed) Tri-X 290 OC edition from Amazon Warehouse deals. Initial price £149.13 delivered, as not stated it was missing HDMI lead / molex to 8 pin PCI-E / molex to 6 pin PCI-E, quick live chat = £15 back. Prior to purchase agreed a 1yr warranty with them . If I was you and couldn't wait for pascal then I'd keep an eye out for a stop gap GPU. It was clocked 1000/1300 out of box, without any voltage increase I gained 1145/1495 stable. Added 390 memory controller timings and tightened RAM timings giving another 1-3% boost. Now going in my Q6600 rig for f@h action for CPC/Bit Tech team .
Yeah im not sure what to do... I do have a second machine downstairs which I could drop this 7970 in with to SLI and take a temporary card until pascal......any suggestions?
New here ( ) , so don't know how much deviation from thread title is permissible. So on that basis I'd suggest starting a new thread and state in opening post budget, current res you use and planned plus expectation of performance gain from another suggested GPU and possibly what games you play.
2500k really needs to be at 4.5ghz to compete with modern I5s. That shouldn't be too difficult though as nearly all will do that (but you will need to add volts no doubt). http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k Is a very interesting article and we seem to finally be at the point where faster RAM does actually make a difference. We're also at a time where most should be going from 8gb to 16gb any way, which makes it even more palatable, so you may as well up the speed along with the size. BTW as for your mention of 4k. 4k user here, and have been since two Titan Black were a thing. You could put a slice of potato in your CPU socket for 4k and it would be the same as any other CPU. At 4k so much onus is on the GPU set up that the CPU itself becomes a distant memory. I found this out when my 3970x blew a board (fets died) and I replaced it with a 2ghz 8 core Ivy and in all games tested I got the same FPS from the 2ghz 8 core as I did from a 3970x @ 4.9ghz. The moral? any old CPU will do at 4k. Worry about what GPUs you have and you need the fastest you can get and multiples of them. Personally speaking? 4k was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made and I wish I'd have waited until Polaris/Pascal for the one GPU that can run games at 60 FPS with the settings high/very high.
Currently running @ 4.7Ghz atm so its running very sweet. I also read another post on that eurogamer website about the i5 2500k vs 6600k and the fps increase is between 5-10% with no OC then it increases upto 20% with a good OC. I think thats a worthy increase in FPS on the games they tested on full settings running 4k. Not to mention the fact that the CPU is starting to hold back some games performances as mentioned in your eurogamer post. I think what I have been wanting is for someone to go yeah just do it...so I can just build a whole new computer....haha silly I know. It gives me a new project right.... I have decided i'm going to build a whole system as my main rig and upgrade the graphics in the current machine which will be my spare, I have a gaming room being built at the moment and this gives "Friends" a computer to use so they don't have to bring their own when we LAN. I do have another machine downstairs which is a nice 7850K APU machine with a 7970 in also but i wont go into that yet haha. Cheers for the advice anyway peeps.
I have three computers sitting in here. All of them are very high spec (Fury X Crossfire, Titan Black and a 760 Mars) and I wonder sometimes what the heck I was thinking haha. Bear in mind that those 20% tests were done early and most of that speed increase is down to the RAM, not the CPU IPC dude. But hey, if the urge is strong and you're bored then who am I to tell you different? (him with three rigs surrounding him, two of which I only wipe the dust off of...)
hahaha I totally understand what your saying...I think once the new machine is built this will serve as a server for my house and my gaming room. I already run a few CS GO servers on occasions online and it runs pretty nice my connection seems to serve fairly well with the server full everyone achieving 30-40 ping. Then when I do hold a few LANs I still have a spare computer etc etc.... Now to price up the new machine.
cpu / ram speed cannot is only part of the story - if at the res / detail you are playing games at , your gpu is at 99% all of the time , then being able to throw more data at it wont help at all - it`ll just bog down more! and we are seeing the likes of the GTX 960 being maxed at 1080P in the latest games. Optimisation wont help here when the sheer amount of visual data is maxing what the card can do ; more cpu cores for better physics? great - card still at 99% , just looking better....
