I built my PC back in 2019. I am still using the same CPU : i7 8700k. I have upgraded my GPU to an rtx 3070. I play only GPU heavy games in 4k usually with DLSS. I’m able to run most games in an acceptable framerate, 50-60fps. I would say my frame times could be better tho. I dont run any CPU heavy applications, but i have noticed that with these latest AAA games it takes forever to compile the shaders. My CPU is pretty outdated at this point, and I’m wondering if it would even be worth upgrading considering my use case and that I am mostly happy with my gaming performance. Oh and I run Linux if that makes a difference.
I am mostly happy with my gaming performance.
That’s the only benchmark you need, friend.
The 1151 socket is only compatible through 9th gen. I doubt you’d see a performance leap from a compatible socket upgrade, and if you’re getting a new mobo, you might as well upgrade the RAM, and now your GPU is the bottleneck, plus you better make sure you have adequate power for it all. Congratulations, you bought a whole new computer.
Intel has gone out of their way to make it harder to upgrade components. You should save up to buy a whole new system when you are no longer happy with your current performance.
That’s what I was thinking too. And right now I can’t upgrade my GPU anymore without also upgrading my PSU. I also didn’t think about the mobo socket component, so that does limit me more anyway. I will just keep this one until it doesn’t keep up with the newest titles and then go to AMD for my next PC.
That’s what I did as well, upgraded to 9800x3d and AM5 socket (and ddr5).
I got fed up with intel changing its socket every two generation and if AMD does the same they did with AM4, their socket are here for the long run and wide variety of processors.
You might also have to change your PC case in the future as RTX GPU are getting bigger and bigger.
I didn’t realize that Intel has been changing the socket that often. That’s really lame, and gives me another reason to move to AMD. And my 3070 is pretty much the max for my case and MOBO.
Upgrading your CPU should help a decent bit with average percents, but the 1% and 0.1% lows should be WAY better.
I had a GTX 1080 at 4k and going from a Ryzen 1800x to 3700x to 5800x3D all saw pretty huge improvements in the lows. Average still saw some gains here and there. You should see a LOT more gains than me.
Keep in mind you’re not always GPU or CPU bound. Depending on what’s going on it could flip flop around.
https://pc-builds.com/bottleneck-calculator/result/0NY175/1/general-tasks/3840x2160/
Effectively no gain, it’s a pretty balanced system so if you upgrade one then the other is gonna be bottlenecked.
I didn’t even know this site existed. This is really helpful, thanks!
Check how much CPU is being used during normal activities (task manager, process explorer whatever). If individual cores visit 100% usage briefly, that’s perfectly fine. If all cores go 100% for a while, that’s probably fine as well. If you see that the entire CPU maxes out for long periods of time, that could be a bottle neck. If you see that sort of thing happening when doing something exotic, that’s perfectly fine. You don’t need to upgrade your CPU just so that some once-a-year thing runs better. If you see that every day, you might want to consider upgrading.
BTW you can also use the same method to figure out if your GPU, RAM or disk is a bottleneck.
I use mangohud overlay and while I don’t track each CPU core, I track the overall percentage and it hardly over 60% while gaming.
That means your CPU should be just fine, though single thread performance could still be an issue.
If the overlay can’t show you all the cores separately, you would need to alt+tab to check the proper CPU graph from time to time. If single thread performance is a bottle neck, you should see a single core staying at 100% for a long period of time or multiple cores taking turns to briefly visit 100% load.
I went from a 7k i7 to a 12k a year and a half back. It was a massive difference overall. I got an AI machine and run Linux with no gaming. I’m not sure when the internet hardware went to the multi threaded thing but that was huge by comparison. I can pull 10gb in just a few minutes at most when it took around an hour on the old machine, same internet connection too and the same rather old OpenWRT router.
With 64gb of DDR5, 20 logic threads, and a 16GB GPU, I can run much larger quantized LLMs and diffusion models than most people get to play with. If I cared about AI stuff, I would definitely get a 24gb+ GPU, as many logical cores as I could reasonably afford, and as much of the fastest memory I can fit. No joke, and no skin in the shill space. I just wish I could run Flux cooler and faster for diffusion. And I would love to try out Command R and other even larger models, but I’m limited by total processors. Llama.cpp will split LLM loads between the CPU and GPU automatically, so yeah I’m turning all of this up to 11 regularly. Skip on Intel 13k-14k and the latest as junk. 12k on Intel is the last decent reliable hardware.
i have 3060ti and upgraded from 9600kf to 7800x3d and in some games the framerate nearly doubled, and every game has less major stutters. from what i have read, the issue was proton using some L3 cache which is small in intel CPUs. i do target 120fps tho, so if you have a 60hz screen it might make less of a difference to you.
btw disable shader pre compiling in steam, that does nothing but waste your time. absolutely no difference in performance.
I actually have a really nice monitor, 4k and 144hz. I would like to change to AMD, but I’m at the point where I’d have to upgrade my whole system. Oh really? That sucks, glad to know I wasted all that time waiting for shaders to compile lol
