Worth the Upgrade?

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Nightscoming

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Dec 26, 2016
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My motherboard has a 1150 LGA socket and right now has a i7-4770S cpu. Im wondering if its worth upgrading to the best cpu for that socket which is I believe the i7-4790K. Will the upgrade be noticeable in games? I believe my current cpu is bottlenecking my gtx 1070 ti and im hoping I dont have to get a whole new motherboard + ram to fix this.
 
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There will be a modest difference when not GPU bound, but the size of the difference, and its frequency of occurrence will probably not be enough to be worth the effort for the majority of people. Here is a comparison of the i7-4790k against a CPU that is almost the same as yours (only 100 MHz clock difference for base and turbo): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1369?vs=1260 Note that performance in all tests is very similar.

Overclocking the k-series part would buy you a bit more performance than this comparison demonstrates, but again, not enough to be worth the trouble of the upgrade (i.e. the cost of the CPU, plus some much better cooling to support the overclock, plus the time investment searching for working and...
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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The 4790k is only moderately faster than the 4770s, and not enough to be worth the cost of a 4790k unless you can get it fairly cheap AND only if you also have a Z series motherboard so you can overclock or get full boost performance out of it.

Honestly, I don't think it's worth the upgrade cost AND I doubt your system will see a significant improvement in CPU performance unless you get a 4790K and drop a full time 4.5Ghz or higher overclock on it. Truthfully, with a 4/8 core/thread count and the single core performance of your CPU, it really SHOULDN'T be a major issue with that card.

You have better performance than a Ryzen 3 and better single core performance than any current Ryzen CPU, and plenty of people are using them with 1080 ti's or 2000 series cards. You don't have as many cores as a Ryzen 5 or 7, or one of the newer Coffee lake/refresh skus so you'll lack some of the multithreading power, but it should be a big deal with 8 threads unless you're trying to do some heavy multitasking such as recording, streaming or other simultaneous and demanding processes alongside your game engine.

What I WOULD do, is make sure you have the most current motherboard bios version installed, check to see that you have the latest driver versions installed from your motherboard product page for the chipset, storage controllers, audio and network adapters and then do a clean install of your Nvidia drivers as outlined here:

*Graphics card CLEAN install tutorial using the DDU*

If it's been a fairly long time since you've done a clean install of the operating system, THAT would something you want to look at doing, and might be a very good idea as well.
 
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TrackSmart

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There will be a modest difference when not GPU bound, but the size of the difference, and its frequency of occurrence will probably not be enough to be worth the effort for the majority of people. Here is a comparison of the i7-4790k against a CPU that is almost the same as yours (only 100 MHz clock difference for base and turbo): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1369?vs=1260 Note that performance in all tests is very similar.

Overclocking the k-series part would buy you a bit more performance than this comparison demonstrates, but again, not enough to be worth the trouble of the upgrade (i.e. the cost of the CPU, plus some much better cooling to support the overclock, plus the time investment searching for working and non-abused parts).

Your stock CPU should not be a huge bottleneck, unless you are running at low resolution/low quality settings in order to achieve extremely high FPS (i.e. for high refresh rate gaming above 120 Hz).
Evidence: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3412-intel-i7-2600k-revisit-2018-benchmarks-vs-9900k-ryzen-more
And that's with a GTX 2080Ti, which is more likely to be CPU-bound due to its much higher performance compared to a 1070 ti (no offense to the excellent 1070 ti!)
More evidence with a closer cousin to your GPU: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2867-intel-i7-2600k-2017-benchmark-vs-7700k-1700-more/page-3

I'd say enjoy your GTX 1070ti and your current platform. And when you are ready to upgrade, really upgrade! The main reason to go down the same-socket upgrade path you mentioned would be if you have a 1080p 120 HZ monitor AND want to game at high framerates (with much lower quality settings) AND you would get great joy out of tinkering with a k-series part AND could get the CPU and cooling solution for basically nothing AND your current motherboard and power supply could handle the strain of overclocking. That's a lot of caveats. But if its you, the internet (i.e. yours truly) gives its blessing to do this thing of which you speak.


 
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