CPU and motherboard upgrade

[gooche23]

Hello,

I upgraded my GPU a couple of years ago but only recently started playing more demanding games and have been underwhelmed with its performance so thought this could be caused by a bottle neck from the CPU?

Should i be looking to upgrade the CPU and motherboard now or am i wrong with my thinking?

Current set up

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060​

Intel Core i5-6600K​

Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. - Z170XP-SLI-CF
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB


Thanks

 

[gooche23]

Most recently is baldurs gate 3, 1920/1080. It defaulted to ultra, i dropped it to High. Its mostly fine but when first launching or going into a new zone the textures can take 10 seconds to fully load.

Had a similar issue on Hogwarts legacy and Read Dead 2

 

[gooche23]

IMHO you are not going to get much gaming performace boost from CPU upgrade given your GPU. Besides, current intel LGA1700 socket is obsolete and will be replacesed with LGA1851 later this year with the release of Intel's 15th gen Core CPUs. This means that if you upgrade CPU now, you would not up able to upgrade again without changing your motherboard too. There is also a question of RAM - new(er) CPUs will require you to upgrade to DDR5, whould you increase the upgrade cost.

If I were you, I'd wait till 15th gen Core CPUs later this year and upgrade CPU + Mobo + Ram.

If you want to upgrade anyway, the other option is to change the CPU only,

Do you have a SSD?

Yeah but only 250gb, just has OS etc on it. Running games on standard hard drive

 

[gooche23]

I still have a free m2 slot free so could utilise that if that’s a simpler fix.
Are they as compatible with the motherboard compared to a sata ssd?

 

[gooche23]

Thank you both for the suggestions, i will look into that as first point of action