Upgrade from i7 920 to i7 4770K..worth it?

[Bighairyman]

Simple question. I am running a 920 i7 (OC to 3.7ghz) with a Nvidia 590 video card. Would it be worth it to upgrade to a i5 4770K? This is for gaming purposes...I run at 2560x1440

Note: I've updated the question. Was considering the 3570K a while back..

 

[amuffin]

No! Wait another 2 generations, that would be the most optimal upgrade for you!

The i7-920 is plenty fast even in today's standards.

 

[drew13]

I looked at anandtech and you will have around a ~25% increase in performance if you upgraded; however, you should, like amuffin said, wait a bit. (Maybe Intel will discover a new technology that is 20x faster than ivy bridge! :O) maybe.

 

[drew13]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/47?vs=701

 

[Supernova1138]

At this point you almost might as well keep running your i7 until it dies, or at least until Intel decides to put some effort into improving CPU horsepower rather than power efficiency and integrated graphics.

Right now there isn't much point in you upgrading, even if you overclock the 3570k, it still won't be much faster than your i7 at 3.7 GHz, not enough to justify spending the money on the upgrade. In the vast majority of games, you're going to be GPU bound anyway.

The only other reason to upgrade from what you have right now is if you desperately want some features that aren't available on the X58 platform, eg. native USB 3.0 support or native SATA 6Gb/s support.

 

[raj072]

Maybe to a 6 core with hyperthreading or maybe a 3770K but not a 3570. You lose 2 megs of L3 cache, you loose 4 threads. If you want USB3 get a add on card. Waste of money and lose some features so could be a down grade is rare instances. If you want to throw money away, send me the 500.00 for the upgrade I'll find good use for it

I've got a 920 and in same boat. Nothing that has come out since really much better. They working on power savings not performance in this phase. Sad to say but will need Haswell or maybe even next gen after haswell to get that WOW effect.

I've got a 3770k, very nice chip but no WOW over the 920.

Here is a guy comparing a 920 to a 3770k (better then I5) head to head
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?280860-Ivy-Bridge-3770K-Gaming-results-vs-Core-i7-920-at-4.2GHz

 

[theonerm2]

Like everyone else said... The difference isn't really worth upgrading for.. You have a nice CPU that you can still get a couple more years out of. Some people like to upgrade every year and sell their old processors and graphics cards. While most of us here would love to always have the latest and greatest computer hardware it is just becoming less and less necessary to have it. What might actually be holding you back a little bit at the resolution you're playing on is your GTX 590 and its 1.5GB of vRAM. I know it has 3GB of vRAM on the board but that 3GB of RAM is shared between 2 GPU's so technically you only have 1.5GB to work with. Lower your resolution to 1920x1080 and see if your games play a little better. If you want to play some really demanding games at 2560x1440 then you want to upgrade to a graphics card with a bit more video memory. The GTX 590 is a fantastic graphics card and it's actually faster than the GTX 680 but it is limited by its lower capacity RAM. At higher resolutions you are definitely going to be more limited by your graphics card than your CPU.

 

[8350rocks]

At this point you almost might as well keep running your i7 until it dies, or at least until Intel decides to put some effort into improving CPU horsepower rather than power efficiency and integrated graphics.

Right now there isn't much point in you upgrading, even if you overclock the 3570k, it still won't be much faster than your i7 at 3.7 GHz, not enough to justify spending the money on the upgrade. In the vast majority of games, you're going to be GPU bound anyway.

The only other reason to upgrade from what you have right now is if you desperately want some features that aren't available on the X58 platform, eg. native USB 3.0 support or native SATA 6Gb/s support.

Like everyone else said... The difference isn't really worth upgrading for.. You have a nice CPU that you can still get a couple more years out of. Some people like to upgrade every year and sell their old processors and graphics cards. While most of us here would love to always have the latest and greatest computer hardware it is just becoming less and less necessary to have it. What might actually be holding you back a little bit at the resolution you're playing on is your GTX 590 and its 1.5GB of vRAM. I know it has 3GB of vRAM on the board but that 3GB of RAM is shared between 2 GPU's so technically you only have 1.5GB to work with. Lower your resolution to 1920x1080 and see if your games play a little better. If you want to play some really demanding games at 2560x1440 then you want to upgrade to a graphics card with a bit more video memory. The GTX 590 is a fantastic graphics card and it's actually faster than the GTX 680 but it is limited by its lower capacity RAM. At higher resolutions you are definitely going to be more limited by your graphics card than your CPU.

+1

 

[Bighairyman]

Like everyone else said... The difference isn't really worth upgrading for.. You have a nice CPU that you can still get a couple more years out of. Some people like to upgrade every year and sell their old processors and graphics cards. While most of us here would love to always have the latest and greatest computer hardware it is just becoming less and less necessary to have it. What might actually be holding you back a little bit at the resolution you're playing on is your GTX 590 and its 1.5GB of vRAM. I know it has 3GB of vRAM on the board but that 3GB of RAM is shared between 2 GPU's so technically you only have 1.5GB to work with. Lower your resolution to 1920x1080 and see if your games play a little better. If you want to play some really demanding games at 2560x1440 then you want to upgrade to a graphics card with a bit more video memory. The GTX 590 is a fantastic graphics card and it's actually faster than the GTX 680 but it is limited by its lower capacity RAM. At higher resolutions you are definitely going to be more limited by your graphics card than your CPU.

Good call on the video card..I was planning on upgrading to (2) 770GTXs with the new setup but might just try these with the current system. Didn't even realize the 590 only used 1.5GB of Vram since it's a 2 in 1 card.