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2500k getting a bit long in the tooth?

vantastic

vantastic

vantastic

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In terms of having a balanced system can this cpu still cut it? I have just upgraded to a GTX 780 and custom watercooling with the intention on going SLI and 1440p later this year.

I could upgrade to a 3770k and still use my Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mobo.
 
The CPU is still very decent, especially with high clock you could possibly achieve on a custom loop. :D

SLI though starts to get demanding. I think you would be ok but to have complete performance from your 780 or 780 SLI without possible throttling , then the 3770K might be the best option.
Bearing in mind you could sell your 2500K and look for a second hand 3770K the upgrade is quite reasonable.
 
The 3770k would help if you go sli. Youd just need a bios update for the board prior to installing the i7. But if sticking to a single card the 2500k is still a pretty powerful cpu. Is it overclocked?
 
It wont make an awful difference with one card. With 2 it wouldnt matter how high the i5 was clocked as it will still be a bottleneck with certain games. Bf3 and crysis 3 being examples that i found with sli 670's and an i5 3570k. Switching to a 3770k really helped with theese. I could replicate the same on bf4 by turning off hyperthreading in bios on my current 4770k.
 
If you are under water why aren't you overclocking that 2500k to hell and back. I'm doing 4.6 on a £25 low end cooler, you should be going for 5Ghz plus.

Granted a chip upgrade would offer better support for multiple GPUs but why not squeeze the max out of what you have? You are on the verge of upgrading, that usually gives me the confidence to start pushing the existing cpu further than ever before.

This is OVERCLOCKERS.co.uk :)
 
Have you considered the xeon 1230v2 as an alternative to the expensive i7 3770k, basically its an i7 without the onboard gpu. Hidden gem if you ask me, just make sure you get the right one, with hyperthreading. :)
 
I specifically moved from a 4.4Ghz 2500k to a 4.7Ghz 2700k to make sure my change to 7950 crossfire wasn't going to be bottlenecked.
 
Well thanks for the comments guys, general consensus is the 2500k will throttle running dual gpu’s no matter how high the overclock is which means she has to go.

I7 it is then…..
 
Do the extra hyper threaded cores really help with sli? Most games don't use that many cores so where are the gains from?
 
vantastic said:
In terms of having a balanced system can this cpu still cut it? I have just upgraded to a GTX 780 and custom watercooling with the intention on going SLI and 1440p later this year.
Click to expand...
I can offer some first hand experience here; I usually run a 4.5GHz 2500K in my main system, but I tested a 3770K (@4.4GHz, it wouldn't go any higher) for a few days recently with a view to buying it. The performance difference in games with my crossfired Radeon 290s was basically zero. Benchmarks improved very slightly, but nothing you'd ever notice.

I'll offer the caveat that none of the games I play scale effectively beyond 4 threads (few do) but, to be honest, an overclocked 2500K is still a monster and not a bottleneck at all.
 
DrBombcrater said:
I can offer some first hand experience here; I usually run a 4.5GHz 2500K in my main system, but I tested a 3770K (@4.4GHz, it wouldn't go any higher) for a few days recently with a view to buying it. The performance difference in games with my crossfired Radeon 290s was basically zero. Benchmarks improved very slightly, but nothing you'd ever notice.

I'll offer the caveat that none of the games I play scale effectively beyond 4 threads (few do) but, to be honest, an overclocked 2500K is still a monster and not a bottleneck at all.
Click to expand...

I get 120-140 fps (mins 80fps) in BF4 with a 3750k (4.7Ghz) running 2x7950's.

Contrary to what people say I think it is total sheet that an i7 will give a large fps improvement in nearly all games, my brother has a 6 core, 12 thread 3830k and the same gpu's as me, that basically runs the same fps or slightly less because he can only clock to 4.4Ghz stable.

If you cant run a 4.5Ghz+ overclock then there maybe a cpu bottleneck on ivy/haswell i5's using 2 cards, but I dont think I would change my i5 for an i7 as my friends on BF4 often get lower frames than me with i7's running 2x670's, 2x680's etc. I'm still very happy using the i5 ivy bridge for gaming, dont waste your money if you really dont need to. (for Gaming at least).

Edit,
I have found the i7 with threading on seems to lower the peak cpu usage by around 15% in battlefield 4 with everything max'ed out.
 
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dmferrett said:
I get 120-140 fps (mins 80fps) in BF4 with a 3750k (4.7Ghz) running 2x7950's.

Contrary to what people say I think it is total sheet that an i7 will give a large fps improvement in nearly all games, my brother has a 6 core, 12 thread 3830k and the same gpu's as me, that basically runs the same fps or slightly less because he can only clock to 4.4Ghz stable.

If you cant run a 4.5Ghz+ overclock then there maybe a cpu bottleneck on ivy/haswell i5's using 2 cards, but I dont think I would change my i5 for an i7 as my friends on BF4 often get lower frames than me with i7's running 2x670's, 2x680's etc. I'm still very happy using the i5 ivy bridge for gaming, dont waste your money if you really dont need to. (for Gaming at least).

Edit,
I have found the i7 with threading on seems to lower the peak cpu usage by around 15% in battlefield 4 with everything max'ed out.
Click to expand...

i asked repi about this . he said that they use hyper threading on as it doesn't have any real detrimental effect on performance. i asked did not having ht on mean less fps which he said they hadn't tested it :D

that's the head people of bf / frostbite. so if they not sure on performance i wouldn't worry at all.;)

a i7 with two cards with probably help a little but ingame unless you are a robot and getting enough fps you wont.

what i have seen on lower settings is i5s with no ht getting slightly higher fps than i7s. so maybe the max settings which not that many play with in bf4 mp, a i7 may be better for ultra all.

seeing as most though play either low med or high it just shows you what sales talk can do :D
 
dmferrett said:
Edit,
I have found the i7 with threading on seems to lower the peak cpu usage by around 15% in battlefield 4 with everything max'ed out.
Click to expand...

Do you know what Hyper Threading is, its the virtual cores on the i7. So of course you will see a drop in cpu usage if the game(s) is not very cpu demanding.
 
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