How much FPS would I gain if I overclocked my i5 4670k?

Pavel Pokidaylo

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Jun 8, 2013
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Hi. I want to know how much of an icrease I'd be looking at if I were to overclock my i5 4670k.

Here is my rig...

Case- Carbide 500R
Mobo- MSI G45 Gaming Z87
CPU- i5 4670k
GPU- MSI 780 ti Gaming
RAM- 8gig Gskill Ripjaw 1600xmp
CPU cooler- Noctua NH-D14

I play all kinds of games from MMORPGs to FPS. I am currently gaming on my Dell 24 inch 1080p monitor but will hopefully be upgrading in that department soon. I'm considering the Asus ROG SWift monitor.

Thanks for the input :)
 
Solution


This is actually the opposite of what you would expect. The higher the resolution the less likely the performance would be capped by CPU so moving from 1080p to 1440p would make it more likely to not notice a difference by overclocking the CPU but changing or tweaking the video card instead.

In times when CPU is the major issue then scaling the resolution or AA settings for instance has very little impact on the performance. In these...
At 1080 resolution you won't see any difference. When you go with multiple monitors or a 1440 or higher display, then you might (and I stress might) get into a processing load which an overclocked CPU could show beneficial. You have a fast system... Are you actually seeing low frame rates?
 

Traciatim

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This is actually the opposite of what you would expect. The higher the resolution the less likely the performance would be capped by CPU so moving from 1080p to 1440p would make it more likely to not notice a difference by overclocking the CPU but changing or tweaking the video card instead.

In times when CPU is the major issue then scaling the resolution or AA settings for instance has very little impact on the performance. In these situations (especially in single thread heavy games like most MMORPGs) then overclocking will really show it's benefit by scaling pretty well with how much overclocking you do (for instance, make your CPU 15% faster ,your minimum frame rate goes up by somewhere near 10-15%).

If you are noticing slow down and are playing on a 780ti at 1080p then it's likely the CPU is the issue, since that's a huge amount of pixel pushing power. Why not just take a benchmark of a game you notice slow down in with fraps and do a slight overclock like 10% faster or so and run through the same test and see your differences?
 
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Pavel Pokidaylo

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Hey thanks for the quick response. I can run almost all games with max settings and 60fps, even with AAs turned up. Crysis 3 ran very well except there were some parts where FPS would drop to around 35 but I noticed that happen with all three video cards that I've played it on. It seems some of these Ubisoft games can be problematic though. My Card game with AC Black Flag for free and I had to do some tuning to get it to run well. Firstly, the game has no buffer setting so when I turned on Vsync and went below 60fps my fps would get cut in half. I found a workaround for this in a program called D3Doverrider, it worked great. I was able to play with Vsync on and no halfing of my fps. The other thing that destroyed my FPS in this game was that one at the bottom that makes the smoke from your guns all crazy and huge. I forget what's called it now but It's an Nvidia only thing and it would annihilate my FPS when turned up. Also, soft shadows were very stressful for my rig as well as cranking up the AA. With these two settings turned up My FPS would reach the low 30s sometimes. I just set the shadows to very high instead of the soft shadows and set the AA to 2X TXAA and the game ran at or close to 60fps for the most part. It also looked amazing.

The other very problematic game is Watch Dogs. I have not tweaked it much but from what little I did see it ran like total crap. I will probably try working on it later.

I have bought this K series CPU because I figured the overclocking capability would come in handy. I also bought this big Noctua cooler for the same reason. I've tried overclocking it before but I am a big noob when it comes to overclocking and couldn't seem to get it stable at all. Now I'm just debating if it's even worth trying to overclock it or not.

Right now I'm waiting for the ROG SWift monitor to be released. I'm not 100% certain that it is the monitor for me but right now it is looking like it.
It looks like it has many great features but two things it does not have is... It's not 4k and It's not an IPS panel. I've played WoW on my regular monitor and then went and played it on my friends 24 inch dell Ultrasharp and it was a major difference. The colors on his monitor were so much more Vibrant. But this ROG SWIFT is supposed to be a top of the line TN panel and while I've read that no TN panel can match a good IPS panel in visual quality, I'm hoping it comes close. I've seen a few reviews now on the ROG SWIFt and they say they are absolutely blown away and impressed by it, especially the vibrant colors which I like.

4k is another thing to consider but... I'll probably have a hard enough time getting some games to atleast 60fps on the 1440p monitor let alone a 4k one. I may need to buy a second card for SLI for the 1440p. Even two cards though would probably not be enough for me for 4k, and those panels are TN also. I've seen 4k on a 55inch Sony TV and it looked amazing but that was on a big TV and I've read that you don't really see much difference on a 27 inch monitor going from 1440p to 4k but going from 1080p to 1440p or 4k is a huge leap.

I really like my video card and it's great that it will work with Gsync but... I payed $715.00 for it. For around $800 I could get two R9 290s for Crossfire. Even one 290 isn't much slower than my 780 ti but two? I bought my card when the AMD cards were priced astronomically due to the miners buyign them all out and techpowerup.com gave my card a 9.9 review so I got it but I can't help but think about these 290s now lol.

Sorry for the wall of text