i5 3330 upgrade to i7 3770k .. worth it ?

[brianthesnail]

Hi guys
Well its that time of year,and my good lady threw £150 into my greasy palm and said "buy something for your pc " !
to be honest im pretty happy with my current set up ( main rig ) .. the core i5 3330 may be ivybridge but combined with the R9 270X i can run 99.9% of games on steam at 60fps ( high or medium detail settings )
i have a 128gb sandisk ssd in place,so when i saw a "core i7 3770" for £120 second hand i started to think ( thats dangerous ) .. but seriously would a i7 upgrade be worthwhile
its hard to think that only 3 years ago i was struggling with a pentium G620 however when i replaced it with the i5 3330 it was like night and day .. a massive upgrade in every sense of the word
so would the i5 3330 to i7 3770k result in the same night and day upgrade improvement ? ...
thanks guys

 

[Ayahuasca]

I'll have to try and find figures but you might be better off upgrading your GPU to a used 290.

Let me have a look around.

 

[brianthesnail]

Thanks .. i have a MSI R9 270x (4gb) and im pretty happy with that .... and wouldnt the R9 290,s make the i5 3330 a bottleneck ... ?

 

[zipp0r]

i think a getting a 3570k + good heatsink and overclocking it might be a better option. the money left over and what you get from selling the old cpu could be used for something else.

 

[theMilitant]

I don't think going from an i5 3330 to a 3770k will provide you with as large an increase in performance as you got from going from the G620 to the i5, but it will still be quite a noticeable bump up. For £150 though I think I'd just go for the best 2nd hand GPU you could afford. If you can get an R9 290 for that price as Ayahuasca says then I'd hazard a guess that that'd gain you more gaming performance than a CPU upgrade, even if you do bottleneck the card. Otherwise if you do end up upgrading the CPU for £120, spend the remaining £30 on a CPU cooler and at least 8GB of RAM if you don't already have it.

 

[Disco_P]

For £150 with gaming as a priority then a 2nd hand 290 or 780 would provide a way greater experience than a 3770k and your current 270x.

 

[Devrij]

Definitely upgrade the gpu, but if you are set on a cpu upgrade then the main benefit to a 3770k is going to be the ability to overclock it. That extra clockspeed will provide a much better boost than hyperthreading in the majority of games, especially with an entry level gpu.

Ideally you would upgrade both the gpu and cpu to keep a balanced system, but the benefit of a better gpu will significantly outweigh a faster cpu in most games today. Also, you can move your gpu should you decide to move chip sockets later on, so it leaves your options open for the next couple of years (a birthday upgrade perhaps)

 

[pandem0nium]

"core i7 3770" would be the non k, so not overclock able. You would also need a 'z' board to verclock a K chip.

 

[jigger]

You can overclock any Ivybridge CPU as long as you use a P or Z based motherboard. A non K i7 3770 should do 4.3-4.4Ghz no trouble with a Z77 board say. Another chip that would work well would be an Ivybridge Xeon E3.

 

[pandem0nium]

You can overclock any Ivybridge CPU as long as you use a P or Z based motherboard. A non K i7 3770 should do 4.3-4.4Ghz no trouble with a Z77 board say. Another chip that would work well would be an Ivybridge Xeon E3.

You're limited on bus overclocking post 1st gen I series. You may get 105 on the bus as a small increase.

 

[jigger]

You're limited on bus overclocking post 1st gen I series. You may get 105 on the bus as a small increase.

Not just the bus. You can also run 4 bins over the max turbo. On a 3770 that would be 4.3Ghz plus whatever you can get from the bus on all four cores. 43x109 (4.7Ghz) is not unheard of.