Upgrade from i7 3770 to i7 8700k?

[ian.egerton]

Hi,

My current system consists of the following:

Core i7-3770 3.4GHz (Ivy Bridge)
MB ASRock INT S1155 Z77 EXTREME4-M
Corsair Vengeance 16GB Kit (4x4GB)DDR3/1600MHz CL9 DDR3
256GB Samsung SSD 830 Series
Corsair Builder series V2 500W 80+
LG Blu-Ray RW 10x Black SATA Retail BDR BD-RE
CORSAIR Carbide Series 300R

I don't use the system for gaming at all, my primary interest is as a 4K HTPC (Plex Server that serves a few devices and need to transode HEVC 4k to N264 1080p on occasion ) and I also use it to do a lot of heavy handbrake x265 10-Bit encoding at mainly 1080p, but of late a lot more 2160p.

Doing 1080p HEVC gets me roughly 5.5 fps in handbrake with the above system and I was thinking I could get faster encodes by upgrading to the i7 8700k.

My question is would it be worth upgrading the CPU/Motherboard/RAM? I would like to re-use as much of the old system as possible.

I have looked into the i7 8700k, i5 8600k and the i5 8400. Whilst I have been focusing on the highest end, I have raised an eyebrow at the value of the the i5 8400.

I'm not against any of the Ryzen series either but it needs to be able to meet my 4K HTPC requirements (including HDR etc).

Any advice suggestions, would be appreciated.

 

[devbiker]

I'd do it. You'll definitely get better encoding speeds, especially if you use hardware encoding; the iGPU on the Kaby Lake and higher Intels will encode HEVC natively. This would be especially useful with on-the-fly transcoding with Plex, especially now that they have native hardware encoding.
You would need to upgrade CPU, motherboard and RAM. The rest you could keep ... or upgrade ... up to you.

 

[ian.egerton]

I'd do it. You'll definitely get better encoding speeds, especially if you use hardware encoding; the iGPU on the Kaby Lake and higher Intels will encode HEVC natively. This would be especially useful with on-the-fly transcoding with Plex, especially now that they have native hardware encoding.
You would need to upgrade CPU, motherboard and RAM. The rest you could keep ... or upgrade ... up to you.

Thanks for the reply.

Have you any opinion on which cpu would be good to go with for my setup?

 

[devbiker]

It depends on your budget ... for encoding, more threads is always a good thing. You didn't specify your cooler but the rest of your components (outside of CPU, motherboard and RAM) should work with any current system - I think the only question might be the PSU but I think it'll be OK.

 

[ian.egerton]

It depends on your budget ... for encoding, more threads is always a good thing. You didn't specify your cooler but the rest of your components (outside of CPU, motherboard and RAM) should work with any current system - I think the only question might be the PSU but I think it'll be OK.

Cheers.

My cooler is an Arctic Freezer i30. It keeps the i7 3770 at steady temperature even under full load so I was assuming that would suffice.