Afternoon all, PC is starting to show it's age and I was wondering what people recommend to eeek a bit more life out of it. Spec as follows: i5 3570k - stock cooler, never clocked GTX 1060 8GB Ram (1333 Mhz I think?) I think my options are either - Upgrade the chip to a i7 3770k, buy a aftermarket cooler and overclock to 4.2+Ghz, upgrade RAM or other I've missed? Save money towards a new build?
You say it's starting to show its age, in what way? When playing games are you cpu/gpu pegged at 100% (or some cpu cores at least), are you maxing your mem out etc. No point upgrading a component if it's not the limiting factor
A quick glance at prices suggests that a 3770K is going to be about £100 (which seems excessive, but it is the top-end for that socket, so it makes sense). In comparison, you won't get much for your 3570K so it's a relatively expensive upgrade for relatively little extra performance. I think you'd be better served putting that money towards a new build but it will depend on how much cash you have to spend really. In the meantime you could buy a new cooler and clock it a bit, as that should get you some extra performance. And if you play your cards right then you'll probably be able to use the new cooler with any new build you eventually do, which makes it a free upgrade according to my creative accounting methods
I relegated my 3770/Z77 to a secondary rig - it and its iGPU are extremely happy doing mundane tasks. It was plodding along quite well but some gaming was pushing it. I'd suggest saving for an upgrade TBH.
When I got my GTX1080 running games at 1440p on that CPU at 4.6GHz was limiting. I grabbed a 6800k secondhand and it really helped. I think even a 3700k's IPC will be a bit too far behind in modern games, plus as stated its £100, thats 2/3 of a Ryzen 3600 right there. I only went for the 6800k as it, MB and RAM (with windows key) were all £200. I think its time to move on tbh Edit: You missed out not overclocking that chip too, as they were supremely easy to get an extra Ghz out of!
Definitely save up for a new board, CPU and RAM. A 3770k is going to be about £100, which is dumb, you can get a second hand Ryzen 5 CPU cpu for that and all of them outperform the 3770k. Buying new for about £250 you could get a Ryzen 3 3300X, a decent (but not outstanding) B450 motherboard and 8GB of DDR4. The 3300X should be a noticeable bump in performance over your 3570k, it benchmarks better than a 7700k in most things. Or. For about £45 you could add another 8GB of RAM and see what that does, but since any new CPU/board will need DDR4 I'd just keep the money.
Yeah I cheaped out when assembling, and now it seems silly to spend the money on an upgrade cooler. Next time around I will! If I buy new I'll be moving down to mATX for sure
The sad thing is stuff doesn't really overclock any more (or more, it does it itself) so its kind of taken the fun out of it! And even if it can you'll only get a few hundred MHz
I can't say I've been keeping up with the latest developments, hopefully that'll change in the next generations! Cheers all for the help, looks like it's best to wait it out
Its more they're hitting the cieling for clockspeeds, there's only so much you can trim an instruction to run in the smallest amount of time after all, so I doubt we'll be seeing any higher clock speeds
I would say try to grab a cheap set of 8GB first, see if that helps. 16GB is pretty standard nowadays. Try to overclock the CPU, even cheap coolers could get you some gain. i5 3570k overclocked should still be okay. I'm running i7 2700k overclocked to 4.6GHz and it's keeping up fine, playing physics games like HL Alyx, Boneworks in VR. Is that 3GB or 6GB 1060? Eitherway, should be good enough in most games. The 3GB is similar to GTX 970, again, I'm playing VR games using 970 wirelessly. The card not only has to do two 1440x1600 rendering, also has to do x265 video encoding on the fly. Just noticed your monitor setup, are you finding low FPS with the 3x monitor gaming? Then bottleneck would be the GPU. Ryzen 3000 series is due later this year, nVidia and AMD are due to release new graphics card series. So it's best to wait until end of the year (Black Friday is probably best time) for a whole system upgrade.
I'm not sure that is correct, yes you are a not getting many 100s of Mhz overclocks but there is quite some fun tuning a Ryzen system with per CCX overclocks, memory overclocks, IF overclocks, it is quite a challenge and a lot of fun if you get enjoyment out of the tweaking side and maximising performance from your hardware, plenty of knobs to twiddle, certainly a lot more fun than just bumping a voltage and selecting an extra GHz. Though I won't lie after a couple of weeks trying to eeek another 100Mhz out of my RAM and what are my fastest cores, you have sunk so much time in it can grow tiresome Regarding upgrading this system, could be lots of things bottlenecking, for sure 8Gb is not sufficient for gaming really, unless you run quite a pared back system with respect to back ground tasks/clients etc, particularly if you have a low VRAM card you will start paging graphics in system RAM which you do not have, 4 threads not amazing but not the end of the world but has become a limiter of late and a 3770 could see a nice bump but as mentioned by others the 100quid invested here is part way to a low end more powerful Ryzen Chip and some DDR4 RAM. What games are struggling, what resolution do you play at, what are your res/quality/fps expectations from upgrade? Might help steer comments. My old overclocked 3570k had better single thread performance than my current Ryzen chip so if you are able to overclock to the 4.7 region you will do quite well, this will handle games with some minor fps drops but this will likely require a de-lid and games will be peggiing it at 100%, I found the upgrade to 3770k worthwhile once overclocked but systems have moved on, the extra memory bandwidth and cores in new systems makes for a really nice upgrade in general use, also uses a lot less power and has less cooling requirements that an OC'd intel 3x70 chip. It is probably better to push reset on a new system, your parts are old, you could replace bits then have a motherboard fail as I did and find yourself unable to replace that part and have to upgrade anyway, that is how I ended up with a Ryzen as I couldn't find a z77 with PLX to run my triple GPU setup.
Firstly thank you for the indepth reply, just to answer a few of the queries; I'm only playing on a single monitor at 1920 x 1080, games like Black Ops 3 on low settings. Despite this I often see framerates down into the 30s, I'll resolve to leave task manager open in a second monitor so I can watch RAM usage and CPU as I play to see if those are limiting me. The 1060 is a 6GB so shouldn't be any issues there. I'm sure I won't be doing a big upgrade this year, but perhaps next year.
As I mentioned in my first post there's no point doing anything until you've started actually finding out what's causing the problem, just use the overlay of msi afterburner or something similar to show cpu, gpu, mem usage etc.
I thought I'd have a go at COD BLOPS£ tonight, not really played a Cod game for years but got back into shooters with some CS:Source that colleagues set up to maintain some form of sanity and have a bit of fun during this lockdown, enjoyed that again, so thought why not eh Oh my, how COD has changed, I probably should have looked at some reviews before picking it up I'm too old for that game it seems Anyway, some thoughts having put it on my laptop ( an i7-8565 4c/8t machine with 1050 4gb and 16Gb of RAM, free of clutter due to being wiped for an RMA this week. ) Game is often using over 10Gb RAM and CPU usage on my laptop ranges from high 40s -90 odd% so is utilizing 4-8 threads, so yup your machine is probably not got the chops to run this that well as you are finding, you'll need to go through the effort of paring back any crap you have running to make it smooth. Didn't seem to use much GPU RAM with the settings I ran, so don't think it was overspilling into system RAM, though of course it is not the strongest card in my laptop so had quite low graphics settings for 1080p but ran from 45-60fps. I say low, just looked at the settings and everything is high bar Shadow Map and Order Independant Trnasaprency, I guess its just not the best looking game. Only saw a couple of Scenarios so not sure if there are more intensive maps but it was pretty frenetic and packed with stuff to kill so it certainly wasn't empty.
Hey sandys, I often play the zombies mode with my friends which I recommend! I also played a couple of games yesterday with task manager open on a separate screen and it's CPU usage that is pegging to 100% when the frame rate drops occur. I guess I should consider an overclock
Yup, get what you can out of your system with an overclock to tide you over but it is surprisingly resources intensive for a mainstream game, I did not expect to see my laptop hitting 8 thread usage in such a title, RAM I can understand, game engines will often use more if you have it available. It played pretty well on the laptop, accepting the dips to 45fps, the i7-8565 is quite a powerful CPU well for about 15s until it overheats.
I am running the stock intel cooler at the mo so not going to fiddle with it just yet. I'll have a look at some coolers, the Hyper 212 is catching my eye. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/coo...-direct-contact-120mm-quiet-fan-for-intel-amd If I buy a Hyper 212 is it likely to be compatible with the upcoming Ryzen board (The B550 board is it?)
