CPU upgrade

Jasoncmor

Jasoncmor

Jasoncmor

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Joined
13 Feb 2010
Posts
611
Location
Bournemouth
Hi all

I currently have a skylake 6600k, z170 mobo, 8gb ram and a 1080ti.
I game at 1440p and 144hz, would I notice much difference going to a 8700k cpu? Or even a 9700k?
I feel like the i9 chips would be overkill.
Also wanted to up to 16gb of ram.

Cheers and Merry Christmas!
 
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How is the 6600k clocked? 8th and 9th gen mainly add cores at the expense of more heat/power. If you clock your CPU up to similar areas as the later CPUs tend to reach, it will probably be fine for gaming. I'd say not worth a motherboard upgrade.
 
If you can monitor usage over time that helps - MSI Afterburner has configurable graphs for CPU, GPU, memory etc consumption plus temperatures. If your CPU usage is 100% when gaming and the GPU usage is less, then the CPU is holding back the graphics card.

You could also lower graphics settings. If performance (framerate) goes up, the graphics card was limiting performance .
 
Not worth the money imo fella.

I’ve got the 8700K, it’s a great chip, and I chose it because I don’t plan on upgrading my platform for a very long time. However, it’s entirely unnecessary for me at the moment; it barely warms up when I game, especially at the higher resolution I game at.

As someone said, use something like HWmonitor, Corsair Link etc to see what sort of utilisation you’re reaching, and how many cores are actually being levied.

If you’ve got the itchy tinker fingers, perhaps you could consider some other projects; delidding, overclocking, case modding... maybe watercooling?
 
I had a 6600K and upgraded to a 7700K and honestly there was not much of performance difference.

First thing you should do is overclock that sucker, most will do 4.6ghz.

Also is you go 8700k it will mean a new motherboard too and i don't really think its worth it.
 
Cheers for your replies guys.
I’ll get on the benchmarking as soon as I’m back home, currently away for the festive period.
I will defiantly start the overclocking and look at upgrading the ram.
Watercooling is something I always wanted to do, but never got round to it yet.

Is it worth getting another 8gb of ram, or just get a 16gb kit so it stays running in dual channel mode, and just sell the 8gb?

Cheers :)
 
Just replace the 6600K with a 6700K or 7700K if board supports it. The 6600K would be fine for most games with an overclock though either of the i7's would give you more stable frames and higher minimum frames.

In games that are heavy multi-core, like Battlefield 1 or BF V online, there wil be a significant advantage to the i7.

If you're trying to keep cost reasonable, makes sense to just pick up either i7 cheap 2nd hand. I would not pay for a new one obviously as they're obsolete compared to the 9600K or 9700K and similarly priced new.
 
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