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Old i7 for gaming?

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If your running an i5 6500 is a 6th/7th gen i7 a worthwhile option as a cheap upgrade to get gaming performance

Or is it full upgrade time
 
Depends on the graphics card. I was very impressed at the performance recently running a Skylake i7 and RX 6600XT.

I suppose it depends what kind of performance you are looking for.
 
Depends on the graphics card. I was very impressed at the performance recently running a Skylake i7 and RX 6600XT.

I suppose it depends what kind of performance you are looking for.

I do believe he as a 5600xt he was about to upgrade before the world went mad
 
Having had a 6700K with RTX 2070 Super, and then upgraded to 12700K with the same GFX. The difference is night and day. The 6700K was for years great for gaming. But at 1440p even it's too CPU limiting in games where the whole system needs to gel like Cyberpunk 2077 when you start sliding settings towards max.
 
If your running an i5 6500 is a 6th/7th gen i7 a worthwhile option as a cheap upgrade to get gaming performance

Or is it full upgrade time
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if you can get a cheap one but I found the old i7 6th gens still went for £200 and thats a lot to put into a 6 year old chip

when I built the new system the old i5-6600 and mother board ect was all easy to sell you can get about £100 for a mobo and cpu bundle maybe a little more with memory

what games are you using the 6500 for
 
what games are you using the 6500 for
He plays modern but older games like battlefield 1, PUBG the games have worked with his i5 but the setting are slammed. I'm starting to upgrade my pc each payday and I have an i7 so considering selling it to him for the cost of an ssd
 
thats a fair price tbh and should be ok

my old i5-6600 only got outpaced due to a lack of threads so warzone/bfV or suffered at 100% cpu usage

just check his board is compatable a lot of them even though on the same socket didnt support the next gen
 
If your running an i5 6500 is a 6th/7th gen i7 a worthwhile option as a cheap upgrade to get gaming performance

Or is it full upgrade time

Its depends on what games you're playing and what GPU and what sort of frame rates you're looking for.

A Core i5 6000/7000 series is a perfectly adequate CPU for somethings and yes it can also be a serious bottleneck, i remember my 4690K would run Star Citizen like an bag of rusty nails, not really all that surprising but Insurgency, an indie game from 2014, even in that the CPU load would be 100% causing micro-stutter with a GTX 1070 if i allowed the GPU to render as many frames as it could, that being around 150 at 4K, but if i capped the frame rates to 75 it was fine.

If you think you're going to be running an RTX 3070 or higher with a CPU like that in modern titles, you're in for a bad ride. if your more about e-Sports its fine.
 
As mentioned he as a 5600xt

Oh i see, i was answering your original post, if its worth upgrading from an old CPU is always "it depends" current CPU's are much much faster than much older ones but that doesn't mean it would be much better to upgrade, "it depends" on what its needed for.

There is not much to upgrade to from a 5600X, if you have a 3090 and want some more 1080P FPS on top of your 100+ you might get up to another 15 with a 12600K......

The 5600X is not the best gaming CPU right now, but its not far off and pretty potent, for how little he would gain, if anything, its just not worth changing the whole platform.
 
I'm going to assume you have had a beer or 2, nobody mentioned a 5600x cpu

No, i'm going to blame AMD for their silly naming, where a GPU is just one letter away from being mistaken for a CPU..... :o

If he can find a cheap 7700K i think it will make a significant difference.
 
To add to that i don't think its enough GPU to warrant a platform change, try to get a 7700K as cheap as possible and overclock the proverbial's off it....
 
Having had a 6700K with RTX 2070 Super, and then upgraded to 12700K with the same GFX. The difference is night and day. The 6700K was for years great for gaming. But at 1440p even it's too CPU limiting in games where the whole system needs to gel like Cyberpunk 2077 when you start sliding settings towards max.

CP2077 really needs at least 6 cores, 12 threads if you turn settings up and loves RAM bandwidth up to a point - you can literally get ~17-20% performance increase from faster RAM in the game on some platforms.

Testing with my older 4 core, 8 thread i7 it really bogged down in places but on my 2013 era Xeon (6 cores, 12 threads) it mostly played fine at 1440p with all settings on ultra - couple of places where the streets were busiest I'd see CPU use increase to around 80% and FPS drop off a bit but the only solution for those situations is more cores really as turning CPU frequency up alone doesn't really alleviate it in those bits. Even swapping over to a 10 or 11 series 6/12 CPU isn't really enough in those bits - you need 8 cores.
 
I gues son those CPUs that will still be the case in the city when busy, on the 12th gen CPU I have found there's no fps drop in the city any more and it's at a point where I installed a mod that increases crowd density and traffic and still see no drop which was quite impressive! That's on 3600MHz RAM and a 3080 Ti now of course so would kinda expect no issues at all.

Give the game some slack to work with and it will power through smoothly has been my experience.
 
The i3 12100F looks an exellent gaming CPU if your on a budget, if you have a bit more to spend then move up the i5 12400F.
 
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