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Any worthy i5 2500k upgrade?

Hiijinx

Hiijinx

Hiijinx

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Joined
11 May 2009
Posts
1,040
Hello all,

My upgrade urges are tingling...

Since my last build , PC usage has shifted from primarily just gaming to lots of 3d rendering and was looking into possible upgrades to speed up production.

Currently I have my trusty i5 2500k clocked to 4.4ghz, asrock z68 extreme 7 gen 3, 8 GB gskill and a msi 7979 be. Running win 7.

Have been watching skylake but unsure if I want to spend top whack on a new release or get something from the existing generation - IF it was worth it getting an i7.

Plans are to also upgrade rest of PC so the girlfriend gets a long overdue hand-me-down so am keeping that in mind too. The 980ti is tempting me to jump to team green...

Thanks in advance,

Hiijinx
 
If you are seriously considering an upgrade then you've nothing really to lose when Skylake comes along if you want to use all the features that come along with that chipset. I'll be finally retiring my 2500k on my everyday rig for z170 chipset. I'll be sad to see the 2500k go even though to this day its still a fantastic cpu.

Windows 10 + dx12 are supposed to take advantage of your cores better so who know's maybe a 6 core current gen will still be a able to put up a good fight against Skylakes 4 cores. We won't now until we see some proper benches.
I still have a 6 core 4930k on X79 which is also a fantastic chip, but I find it handy for Folding/BONIC not so much used for gaming.

With regards to 980ti, it'll be interesting to see it against the red team and the pricing.
 
Same boat; Haswell simply isn't compelling, and I only have one multi-core game anyway, so I'm waiting on Skylake benchmarks, and to see whether Kerbal Space Program goes multi threaded. Both need to be good before I'd see it as worthwhile.

For your purposes, an i7 might be very useful to gain the hyperthreading, but your biggest gain would presumably be to go for the E series and step it right up to 6 cores plus HT :)

Orrr... are there not GPU rendering options available now? I thought Blender was a graphics card program these days.
 
I would hang on guys , to be honest I don't see any reason to upgrade for a long time , been playing games on ultra settings on 4k no problems at all with i5 2500k and its not even over clocked.
 
jasonsony735 said:
I would hang on guys , to be honest I don't see any reason to upgrade for a long time , been playing games on ultra settings on 4k no problems at all with i5 2500k and its not even over clocked.
Click to expand...

You can play 4k ultra with a single 290x!? What are you playing? Pinball on xp? :p

Go x99 and a 5960k because you can!
 
Although my machine is primarily a games machine I'm yet to see any game really struggle. Sure you might get a benefit from a faster chip but as you've said, I'm waiting for Skylake to have a dramatic improvement over what I've got. My CPU is four years old and I see no reason to upgrade. DDr4 is still hella expensive too!
 
Thanks for replies, guess I will wait to see what skylake turns out to be.

I enjoy jumping from AMD/nvidia/intel on upgrades, but AMD doesn't seem to be giving me many options which is a shame as I used to love running amd/nvidia combos.
 
It would be funny if Intel's lack of meaningful progress followed by Mantle/DX12 introduction makes 2500k a CPU that never needs upgrading for gaming. :p
 
MichaelM said:
It would be funny if Intel's lack of meaningful progress followed by Mantle/DX12 introduction makes 2500k a CPU that never needs upgrading for gaming. :p
Click to expand...

Does dx12 take a long of typical CPU compute and direct it towards the GPU? Need to read up on it.
 
I upgraded from a 2500k to a 2600k, I think the upgrade cost me less than £30 by the time I sold the old one.

Definitely a noticeable performance increase in gaming. I should think the hyperthreading will help a lot with 3D rendering if the software supports it.
 
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