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5960X upgrade for gaming

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
35,564
Hi all, is it worth upgrading my CPU at all? The PC is only ever really used for gaming and sometimes the odd virtual lab, but that's mostly done on my MacBook Pro.
 
Nope, that's a great CPU. Yes, its a couple of gens old (I Use a Overclocked 3960X) but it still performs fantastically. Yes, you will get better performance from something like a 7980XE but that is more of a HEDT CPU so it CAN perform slower in some respects than your current cpu. Also bearing in mind that most games will not take advantage of your current cores it wont utilise 10+ You would also have to upgrade your board and unless you have a big AIO or custom loop you will have to change that.
 
I've just looked at the price of that CPU. No thanks! :p

I have a good custom loop, it's way overkill as it was originally designed for SLI but I only have a single GPU now.
 
You would be golden I expect with an overclock on that CPU, more then capable of pushing 60 FPS at 3440 x 1440 (if that is the monitor you game on in your sig) in most games.
 
ChrisD. said:
I've just looked at the price of that CPU. No thanks! :p

I have a good custom loop, it's way overkill as it was originally designed for SLI but I only have a single GPU now.
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HAHA On my 3rd build of the week using the i9-7980XE... ;)

If you want a bump in performance you would be better served with keeping an eye out for a i7-6950X. Its a VERY expensive CPU new but I would have thought you should be able to pick one up around £5-600 second hand and you should get at least half that back selling your 5960X. It would also be just a BIOS update and replace the CPU and you are golden as its a drop in replacement. Not bad for an upgrade from 8 core 16 thread to 10 core 20 thread. ;)
 
ZXSpectrum said:
If you want a bump in performance you would be better served with keeping an eye out for a i7-6950X. Its a VERY expensive CPU new but I would have thought you should be able to pick one up around £5-600 second hand and you should get at least half that back selling your 5960X. It would also be just a BIOS update and replace the CPU and you are golden as its a drop in replacement. Not bad for an upgrade from 8 core 16 thread to 10 core 20 thread. ;)
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£300 for two more cores is a pretty bad use of money.
 
As above, I'd just stick the Trigone remote system monitor server on your PC then monitor core usage on your phone. I'm running an absolutely ancient hex core x58 Xeon x5650 clocked to 4.4ghz and even in games like pubg where it utilised all 6 cores, they are low utilization, so I've no intention to upgrade for some time. Law of diminishing returns.
 
I think I'll keep hold of it. I was hoping I'd be able to move to something that would give me similar or better performance yet save me some money.
 
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