Upgrade to 4790k, 4790, or 4690k

Does your motherboard support overclocking? Well either way the 4790K would be a good choice for your needs and the price is reasonable. Just make sure you grab a good aftermarket cooler as it runs a bit warm.

It's ok, it has a basic auto overclocking feature but tbh you really won't need it with the 4790K as it's clocked higher with a higher boost speed over the other Haswell/Devils Canyon CPU's.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (£134.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: Asus - PRIME B350M-A Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (£58.20 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (£169.67 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £362.86
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-25 19:03 BST+0100

Seriously not worth the expense to go with any pre-coffeelake i5, you'll be running into the same 4 thread limitations. Coffeelake i5's run better than previous i7's in low core usage due to better IPC and basically tie in multiple thread apps since there's 6 full cores vrs 4core +hyperthreading.

The i7-4790/k would be the only cpu worth the money, but in low thread apps, you'll not see much if any difference, only in multiple threaded will it be an advantage. CoffeeLake or Ryzen 5 - noticeable difference at any thread.

can drop a lot during intense graphical moments

Click to expand...

That sorta sounds like a GFX card issue. I would go ahead and invest $60 in the 4690K. You can then turn around and sell the 4590 and recoup that or keep for troubleshooting. Then it's time for a GFX card upgrade. That I believe will return the biggest performance boost. Do you game at 1440p? Hmmm, with those numbers I think it's 1080p.

I think your best bet is a 1080 or preferably a 1080 Ti. I had a 970 and when I upgraded I thought it best to skip at least one generation. I recommend you do that as well. I had to buy a 1070 or better. I NEVER could afford an 80 or an 80 ti. A 570 Classified and a 970 FTW were both great cards but they JUST missed the mark for my gaming wants. You have the 980 so I recommend nothing less than a 1080.

Although these are opinions they are informed opinions. I was in a similar position. On a side note I had to save money for about 9 months. The first pic below is what I had followed by what I have.



I wouldn't delve into OC'ing. Your VRMs, mosfets and other things I don't understand are lacking a passive cooler. I have a MSI Z97 board made for light OC'ing. Your board is not made for OC'ing. The Genie is in the building but the OC will be minimal.

Any upgrade outside of the cpu family will require a motherboard upgrade too. You have currently an lga1150 setup. You can use any lga1150 cpu. Lga1150 also happens to be the last Intel motherboard to use DDR3 ram. So you can easily move from i5-4590 to i7-4790k (if the bios accepts the chipset, many 3rd party like hp/Dell don't), and it'll physically fit.

With lga1151, that changed. 6th gen Intel does not really use any ddr3, it's based on ddr4 ram. It's also a different socket. Only cpus in 6th and 7th gen Intel work on lga1151. 8th gen is lga1151 but might as well call it lga1151 v2, it's also a different socket and only 8th gen work on it. All use ddr4 ram.

So even moving from i5-4590 to i5-8400 will require a full motherboard / ram change.

But this is where things get trixy. In the past Intel has used a 'tick-tock' approach to its cpus. Lga1155 is 2nd gen/3rd gen, lga1150 is 4th gen/5th gen, lga1151 is 6th gen/7th gen, lga1151 v2 is 8th gen and should be 9th gen too, but Intel is bringing out the 10nm process, 6th/7th/8th being 14nm, so it's widely thought that probably 9th gen Intel will not be lga1151 v2, but something different. This kills any possible upgrade path, if you have an 8 series Intel, that's all you can use. AMD AM4 will support any cpu upto the year 2020, guaranteed by Amd, so there's still cpus/APU's not released yet that'll work on any AM4 mobo.

I5-8400 = R5 1600. Basically the same, within a few fps gaming, the Ryzen has better production, more available threads. The new Ryzen+, Raven Ridge and Pinnacle Ridge are 10% faster, so slightly better than a i5-8400.

Anything newer than i7-4790k will require a full change of platform. The i7 is nothing more than a slightly faster version of an i5, both same quad core architecture, but i7 has hyperthreading. So for anything 4threads or less, there's no change. It's only in stuff that used 5 threads or more, i7 has a distinct advantage. So skyrim, cs:go, lol, most other steam games = no real change in fps. Wow, Witcher 3, gta:v, pubg, overwatch, fortnite etc = sizable increase in fps, they use 8 threads.

I5-8400 is 6 full cores. Is about 30% faster per core speed than i5-4590, with 2 extra cores, so will approximate an i7-4790/k in ability plus @30% possibly faster.