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CPU upgrade just for gaming?

broona

broona

broona

Soldato
Joined
28 Aug 2006
Posts
3,022
Location
Hexham
My son's gaming PC is currently configured as follows:-

AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Nvidia RTX3070FE
Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4 CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GA-AB350-GAMING 3
Corsair Vengeance 16GB 3200Mhz
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB
2tb Crucial MX500
Corsair RM750i
Gamemax F15M
Hisense R43B7120 TV

Gigabyte have just released a BIOS update for his motherboard that eventually supports the 5xxx series, is it worth upgrading from his 3600 to a 5600x or 5800x just for gaming? Cheers.
 
Is he playing at full 4K resolution if so then the CPU will not make much difference except for a handful of games.

What games does he currently play?
 
If the CPU is running at 100% load while gaming then its holding back the GPU and needs replacing.

Install MSI Afterburner to display an overlay of what all CPU cores are doing while gaming. Then you'll learn how to quickly spot a struggling CPU.
 
He plays most games at 1440p, some less demanding ones at 4k, just trying to get 60fps in all of them.

He's currently playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk, Cold War, and about to start playing Elden Ring.

Thanks for the replies, he's got Afterburner installed as we had an overheating problem, I'll get it set to show CPU usage.
 
I don't think you will see a massive difference in the games you've listed, especially at 4K.

Another thing that would be worth check is if you have 2 sticks of RAM in the system or just one. If you do have 2 make sure their in dual channel mode and running at their full speed.

If you download and run CPU-Z and give us the information from the memory tab we can see.

https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Download the .ZIP version and you don't even need to install it
 
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Personally i'd go for 5800X if you can get at a good price, if he's anything like my lad he'll have 100 browser tabs open with other little apps running, also gives a little head room for streaming :)
 
Gpu doing nothing and cpu under max load …

turn up the setting load up the gpu and make it work. 3600 is a very capable cpu
 
I upgraded from 3600 to a 5950x

Some games went from 150 to 200fps but any GPU limited games were pretty much unchanged.

Performance in Adobe is much better

I'm at 1440p with a 3080ti
 
It appears that at any resolution above 1080P, the difference is negligible, and he plays everything in at least 1440P, so probably not worth it for now, thanks for the replies.
 
broona said:
It appears that at any resolution above 1080P, the difference is negligible, and he plays everything in at least 1440P, so probably not worth it for now, thanks for the replies.
Click to expand...
Tell him to crank gfx setting up until he notices a drop in cpu usage

if the cpu is slammed and his gpu is anything under 100% his setting are wrong
 
Wing-Man said:
Tell him to crank gfx setting up until he notices a drop in cpu usage

if the cpu is slammed and his gpu is anything under 100% his setting are wrong
Click to expand...

I've just ran a quick Valhalla benchmark, 1440P everything maxed out, GPU 95 to 100%, CPU 40 to 60%, solid 60FPS.
 
broona said:
I've just ran a quick Valhalla benchmark, 1440P everything maxed out, GPU 95 to 100%, CPU 40 to 60%, solid 60FPS.
Click to expand...

If it's just 60fps you're after, I wouldn't bother. In saying this, you can't just run afterburner and look at cpu use as a whole. A lot of games are poorly threaded and don't spread the load as well as would be ideal. As an example, my cpu often shows 30-60% total cpu load in afterburner, yet the reality is that in part it's being hammered with some threads doing little work. I could buy a much faster 4c/8t chip that would show the same total load, yet the frame rate would be much higher.
 
Drollic said:
If it's just 60fps you're after, I wouldn't bother. In saying this, you can't just run afterburner and look at cpu use as a whole. A lot of games are poorly threaded and don't spread the load as well as would be ideal. As an example, my cpu often shows 30-60% total cpu load in afterburner, yet the reality is that in part it's being hammered with some threads doing little work. I could buy a much faster 4c/8t chip that would show the same total load, yet the frame rate would be much higher.
Click to expand...

this is very true, my sons Ryzen 3100 play games fine but on paper now days shouldn’t
 
I noticed a 0-15% performance difference going from a 3600 to 5800X @1440p with an RTX3080 which is around 25% faster than a 3070 so should put even more strain on the CPU. The games that improved the most were the older less graphically demanding games which were already running over 150fps, anything more recent and demanding that ran under 90fps was virtually unchanged.
 
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