What's the best CPU I can upgrade to without changing my MB?

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Crade

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Hey guys and gals,

I am considering a CPU upgrade on my PC I built in November 2014.

First of all, I am running a i5 4690k currently, and have dual GPU's in SLI. My current motherboard is Asus ATX DDR3 2600 LGA 1150 (10Gb/s) Motherboards (Z97-A) with 16gb RAM.

Secondly, is an upgrade even worth it with what I fell like is an aging motherboard? Should I upgrade both? Really don't want to for fear of some random issue popping up, but what do you guys think I should upgrade to and if it will actually make a noticeable difference. I have been playing exclusively BF1 lately and I am experiencing a few issues but I think it may be more related to the game's buggy features.

Any thoughts and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Oh and also I am running Win 7, I will never upgrade to 10, nuff said.
 
Solution
amtseung
Overclocking the i5 will yield results very close to the i7, clock for clock, when a game doesn't explicitly take advantage of hyperthreading. For DX12 content, an i7 would definitely help, although not by as much as one might expect. Hyperthreading doesn't magically create extra cores, after all. Since you have a Z97 motherboard, you could grab yourself a Hyper212 or Cryorig H7 or something and see if overclocking to 4ghz~ish doesn't bring your performance closer to the average performance of a base clock (4ghz) 4790k.

Plus, BF1's DX12 isn't true DX12; it's DX11 wrapped in DX12, so the gains are even smaller. At least that's how it was when the game first came out. Sauce: This here article.

Oh, and if you're considering the...
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Ecky

Ecky

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BF1 is pretty CPU intensive. Replacing your i5 with an i7 4790K would show improvements in it, and I wouldn't be concerned about continuing to use a 3 year old motherboard. I still have working boards from the 90's.

For what it's worth, DX12 would give you far more improvement than swapping out for an i7, and since Microsoft is basically done fixing bugs in 7, you can expect to have more issues as time goes on.
 
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Multipack

Multipack

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Is it your CPU or SLI GPU's causing the bottleneck, thats the question. Dont forget SLI cards doesnt double your VRAM.

Have you checked for any usage stats?

Your CPU is still almost as good as a Skylake i5 and if you didnt want to start a whole new platform then a 4790k would give you a big CPU performance boost.
 
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Crade

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Okay guys thinks for the suggestions, so overall... Upgrade to Win 10 and a 4790? Which would be more significant? The dx12 or the i7? Or both are needed?
 
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amtseung

amtseung

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Overclocking the i5 will yield results very close to the i7, clock for clock, when a game doesn't explicitly take advantage of hyperthreading. For DX12 content, an i7 would definitely help, although not by as much as one might expect. Hyperthreading doesn't magically create extra cores, after all. Since you have a Z97 motherboard, you could grab yourself a Hyper212 or Cryorig H7 or something and see if overclocking to 4ghz~ish doesn't bring your performance closer to the average performance of a base clock (4ghz) 4790k.

Plus, BF1's DX12 isn't true DX12; it's DX11 wrapped in DX12, so the gains are even smaller. At least that's how it was when the game first came out. Sauce: This here article.

Oh, and if you're considering the non-k 4790, I'd consider the Xeon 1231v3 if it hasn't been locked out by microcode. It's essentially said i7 without iGPU, but for $100 less.

I wouldn't hold my breath for DX12, since it places the onus directly on the developers to actually use its features, unlike the previous 3 iterations of directx. And it seems, not many have. I suspect it'll take a while for more games of the mainstream variety to catch onto DX12. There are plenty of games coming out nowadays that aren't fully utilizing DX9/10.
 
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Crade

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Thanks! I do have a 212 but actually have not tried overclocking the cpu yet... will definitely do so and look into a possible i7 upgrade, and thanks for the clarification on dx12. Just another reason why win 10 seems like a waste of my time.. especially considering the BF1 utilization..
 
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Multipack

Multipack

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I disagree with so much of this I dont know where to start lol :pt1cable:
 
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Ecky

Ecky

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While hyperthreading doesn't "create cores", it does allow the utilization of unused parts of the cores. Generally speaking, something like 30% of each core is still unused even when it's "fully loaded", and hyperthreading allows the CPU to make use of those resources, so it's basically free performance without adding cores, assuming the game/program can meaningfully utilize more than 4 hardware threads.

Some charts:

b1_proz_11.png


b1_proz_12.png


b1_intel.png



BF1 isn't a great example of DX12, but even in DX11 it can put a ton of cores/threads to good use. However, it's interesting to note that in DX11, even the 5 year old i7 2600K beats the new i5 6600 by about 7%. In DX12 that lead grows to 17% even with BF1's "bad" example DX12.

Here's a slightly more interesting example:

s6_proz_11.png


s6_proz_12.png



In Civ6, the i5 4670K gains 33% more performance by using the DX12 codepath. More importantly, in DX11, the i7 4770 is only 6% faster than the i5, so the gains of moving to DX12 are around 5-6x larger than the move from an i5 to an i7.


OP will see gains from moving to an i7, and also gains from using DX12 codepaths. Going forward, the gains from DX12 will be larger than you can get from any hardware upgrade, assuming a game's studio has the budget to implement it. DX12 isn't just a switch they can flip for free performance.
 
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