Eximo said:
I don't imagine I will find any benchmarks that show a i5-3450 with a GTX780 as a comparison for any actual proof, but we can look at the raw numbers, with the 3570k thrown in there for comparison.
i5-3450 3.1 - 3.5Ghz
i5-3570k 3.4 - 3.8Ghz (up to 4.8Ghz overclocked)
i7-3770 3.4 - 3.9Ghz
i5-4670k 3.4 - 3.9 Ghz (4.3-4.5Ghz overclocked, high temps)
I7-4770k 3.5 - 3.9 Ghz (4.3-4.5Ghz overclocked, high temps)
What you gain with the i7 chips is a little more cache, and hyperthreading. There are some small gains there for games, but not a lot. They honestly aren't worth the extra ~$100 it takes to get them unless you are doing something other then gaming. Haswell chips also have few new instruction sets that will make certain tasks much faster.
LGA1150 boards, on the other hand, come with a lot of neat features. At a minimum 6 SATA III ports on an Intel raid controller, some boards have up to 10 with added third party controllers. Native USB 3.0 ports, practically everywhere. PCIe 3.0 x16 or dual 8x, plus another PCIe 2.0 8x.
GTX670 is only a reasonable buy because you already have one, otherwise the GTX760 is the better pick. GTX780, and Titan, are based on a different architecture, but the GTX650, GTX660, GTX760, GTX670, GTX680, GTX770 are all the same chip with slight modifications or cripppled sections.
I think your best route would be to buy an updated video card, because that leaves you the option to upgrade the rest of the system later. Though a GTX780 is practically the cost of buying a chip and motherboard and power supply.
Ok. What I've landed on is just getting an
MSI GTX 780 or the
780 Lightning, an
850W PSU, and more
RAM.
These should all work with my mobo right? (I'm still sorta new to this so forgive me)
I decided last night after checking my CPU after running Tomb Raider on Ultra (drops to 40 FPS aren't uncommon) that it never was running at 100%. From what I've read on the internet, that would indicate my GPU is limiting my computer's performance and not the CPU.
In the next five months or so if I start to notice my CPU is running at 100% I'll probably grab an i7-3770k since I can keep my current mobo with that one.
I did turn off the hair feature (forgot what it was called) in Tomb Raider and I gained about 10FPS just from that change. Otherwise everything else is max (I let Geforce Experience apply my graphical settings).
Thanks again for all the help. I'll update next week when I get the stuff installed and let you know how it runs.
Update #1: So I decided to go with just a new GPU, more RAM, and PSU. I picked up an
MSI GTX 780OC,
Corsair TX750, and
Crucial Ballistix 16GB. Out the door after tax and overnight shipping (I'm impatient) it ran me $977.
I'm happy to report my games are running noticeably better (can run Tomb Raider with fancy hair turned on almost locked at 60fps, hair mode off it runs at a silky smooth 60fps). My graphics score on 3D Mark jumped from 7368 to 11561. That's a good 36% jump.
Also important to note. I'm using a Dell XPS 8500 that came with the i5-3450, 8 gigs of RAM, 1TB HDD, and an HD 7770. So far I've been able to replace the GPU 3 times (MSI 660ti, MSI OC PE 670, and MSI OC 780), replace the RAM, the PSU twice, and switch cases. And everything has been literally plug-n-play with no problems whatsoever. The only downside to all the changes I made was I lost built-in WiFi when I switched cases because dell had it sautered into the case so I couldn't remove it without damaging it. So for anyone out there with a Dell XPS 8500 who wants to upgrade, I can attest that at least MSI GPUs work just fine.
Thanks Eximo for the help.