is buying an unlocked i5 cpu and overclocking compatible motherboard worth the extra cost for gaming?

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Ivan Myring

Ivan Myring

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Apr 14, 2013
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I'm trying to decide on a build for a PC. Is it worth the extra £30 to get an i5-4670k over an i5-4570, the extra £20 for a z87 motherboard over a B85 and the extra £30 for the necessary fan? All I would do is gaming and work in office.
 
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8350rocks


Honestly, if you're going to go intel, the 3570k is a better option than the 4670k, especially if you intend to overclock. The 4670k doesn't overclock nearly as well as the 3570k typically does. The performance difference between the 2 is also negligible for gamers.

A good option for you to consider, depending on what productivity tasks you do, would be something like the FX 8320/8350...or even something like the FX 6350, if you wanted to save some money.
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Cons29

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Feb 10, 2010
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well, for the boards, there are some added features like more power phase, better sound, additional controllers, etc.

to answer your question, yes, for me at least. for one, i dont think you can buy a 4ghz or 4.5ghz cpu. so the only way is to overclock. games do benefit from them, a nice pair with a powerful gpu
 
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J_E_D_70

J_E_D_70

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Mar 21, 2012
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I think so given than a game like BF3 already needs a 4.1GHz quad core to get under 100% utilized (if you're at 100%, something's not getting done in a timely manner). It'll likely become more important as more games are highly threaded and each core's doing double duty.
 
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iaminneedofhelp

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Aug 1, 2013
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Yes. For £50 more it means you can knock out a bit more GHz from the processor. Go to overclock.net to see how your processor fares with overclocking. BUT, it depends on the rest of your system, and if you are going to build a crappy system around the i5 get the locked one. Plain and simple.
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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Apr 19, 2006
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Depends on the game. Some games are CPU dependent while others are not. In CPU dependent games a higher clocked CPU can provide better performance compared to stock speed. Examples of these types of games are Skyrim, Battlefield 3 (multiplayer), Hitman Absolution, StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, Crysis 3, Civilization V.

To a lesser extent Far Cry 3 does benefit from higher clock speeds, but it seems AMD's FX series CPU provides better gains in performance than Intel's CPUs as the clockspeed increases. It might be due to the fact that AMD FX CPUs do not perform as well, thus Far Cry 3 gets a decent increase performance. On the other hand Intel CPUs are already powerful enough and thus get smaller gains.

Games that don't really care how fast the CPU is as long as it is not too slow for the GPU are BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Max Payne 3.
 
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8350rocks

8350rocks

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Mar 14, 2013
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Honestly, if you're going to go intel, the 3570k is a better option than the 4670k, especially if you intend to overclock. The 4670k doesn't overclock nearly as well as the 3570k typically does. The performance difference between the 2 is also negligible for gamers.

A good option for you to consider, depending on what productivity tasks you do, would be something like the FX 8320/8350...or even something like the FX 6350, if you wanted to save some money.
 
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