Do I upgrade to i5 4690K?

[TubbyGreg]

Right now I'm using the Pentium K and I'm wondering if I'll actually benefit from an upgrade to a more powerful processor. I'm on an msi z97 u3 plus mobo so I should still be able to have a nice little overclock on the cpu.

 

[This never ends well]

Are you gaming ?

 

[nails666]

Depends on what you do with your PC. I had a Pentium K oc'd to 4.6GHz for a couple of months as a stop gap and for general work it was fine. It did start to struggle when gaming though, minimum fps were pretty bad and there was often stuttering and generally unstable frame rates. Switching to my 4790K was very noticeable in overall smoothness in games and higher max and min fps.

 

[DragonQ]

But guys, games only use two cores!!1!

 

[nails666]

Is surprising how often you still hear that

Definitely not the case with modern games now, when I'm running the Witcher 3 in Xfire I can get 80%+ loading on all 8 cores in Novigrad!

 

[TubbyGreg]

I am/will be using it for gaming.

 

[nails666]

Well I'd say it will be a noticeable upgrade depending on the games you're playing, the more modern the game the bigger the improvement. What GPU are you using?

 

[TubbyGreg]

Well! My old Grpahics card died, but it was an HD 7770 2GB but I will be upgrading to an r9 290 (hella cheap from work) so that's when I though I wouldn't want to hold back its performance.

 

[nails666]

Yeah in that case the Pentium K will definitely be holding back a 290.