i5 4460 upgrade for CPU intensive games

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Blam3

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Jul 10, 2015
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I currently own an i5 4460 and a gtx 960, which has been perfect up until my recent purchase of Total War: Warhammmer. Needless to say, the game destroys my setup on the larger battles, dipping to 18 fps when zoomed out.

I've decided it's time to upgrade, however I'm sorely confused as to what to upgrade to; I've considered upgrading to an i7 4790k, but my motherboard can't overclock (I bought it a while ago for about £40, and I wouldn't dare risk overclocking an i7 on it) and my psu is only a 500w bronze.

The AMD fx 8350 has caught my attention, and my plan at the moment is to buy a CPU/MOBO bundle (one of the gigabyte 990x or msi 970 motherboards, and I would have to buy a better psu of course) and overclock the 8350.

The essence of my question is this: should I buy an i7 4790k and leave it at stock speeds, or buy the amd fx combo (they're roughly the same price, excluding the new PSU, but I'll need a new one soon anyway when I get a new GPU) and overclock it?
 
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Ecky
The FX CPU is actually considerably slower than your current CPU, on average.

The 4790K would be your best choice, even if you leave it at stock speeds. It comes from the factory with a 4.4ghz clockspeed, more cache, and hyperthreading over your current CPU.

EDIT: The 4790K has only an 88w CPU, and your video card has a 120w TDP, so you're still very much within your power supply's abilities. You could probably run that combo on a 300w unit.
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Ecky

Ecky

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Feb 3, 2013
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The FX CPU is actually considerably slower than your current CPU, on average.

The 4790K would be your best choice, even if you leave it at stock speeds. It comes from the factory with a 4.4ghz clockspeed, more cache, and hyperthreading over your current CPU.

EDIT: The 4790K has only an 88w CPU, and your video card has a 120w TDP, so you're still very much within your power supply's abilities. You could probably run that combo on a 300w unit.
 
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Blam3

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Sounds good, do you know how an i7 4770k would perform in comparison to the i7 4790k? They have a £30 difference in price and with the extra £30 I could put it towards getting a new motherboard and PSU in the future to allow overclocking.
 
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Ecky

Ecky

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They're essentially the same CPU, but the 4790K comes from the factory clocked 500mhz / 13% higher, so you can expect it to perform about 13% better. The 4790K also has a slightly tweaked headspreader design (basically) so you can expect its operating temperature to be a little lower.

EDIT: For what it's worth, 4790K's usually have very little overclocking headroom. 4.4ghz is close to the max you'll get with most chips, and sometimes more than you can get with a 4770k, so I personally wouldn't bother with overclocking. You might want an aftermarket cooler to cut down on noise a bit though.
 
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Blam3

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If I did get an i7 4770k with a suitable heatsink, would this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gigabyte-Z97P-D3-Intel-LGA1150-ATX-Motherboard-USB-3-0-SATA-3-and-CrossFireX-/181682707262?hash=item2a4d221b3e:g:OQQAAOSwuhhXXaZy

motherboard be able to overclock it to 4.4 ghz?

Thank's for the help.
 
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Ecky

Ecky

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An overclocked 4770K is unlikely to clock any higher than a stock 4790K without spending a lot of money on cooling, and even then you may only get 1-200mhz tops, so it would be pointless. Plus, you'll need to buy a new copy of Windows if you change your motherboard.
 
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Blam3

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Alright, I'll go for the i7 4790k and if there aren't any I'll get a 4770/4770k and leave it at stock speeds. Thanks for the help.
 
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