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I5 8400 upgrade?

Muso

Muso

Muso

Associate
Joined
15 Mar 2006
Posts
243
Hi all,

I'm interested in knowing if it's worth upgrading from an i5 8400 for gaming or will it be silly money for not much additional performance?

I'm running a 3070 and game at 1440p.

I have the feeling my cpu is a bottleneck for the GPU.

Any advice would be appreciated please, cheers!
 
Hi,

Motherboard is: Gigabyte Z370P D3

Ram:
Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3000C15 Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3000 MHz C15 XMP 2.0 High Performance Desktop Memory Kit, Black
 
Probably 12700 / 12700K or the next gen AMD 8 core CPU. Go with Intel if you want an upgrade this year, consider AMD if you don't mind waiting a few more months.

There's something to be said for waiting a few months, because cheaper boards will be available by then.
 
That's not gaming though is it? Which is what I'm looking to upgrade for.

Userbenchmark shows +11% for game EFPS
 
Muso said:
Hi all,

I'm interested in knowing if it's worth upgrading from an i5 8400 for gaming or will it be silly money for not much additional performance?

I'm running a 3070 and game at 1440p.

I have the feeling my cpu is a bottleneck for the GPU.

Any advice would be appreciated please, cheers!
Click to expand...

your mobo supports a Core i9-9900KS so go with that.
 
An upgrade to the 9900K or any other variant would be kinda dumb at this point. Alder Lake is 28% faster per clock (for the larger / more powerful cores) than the 10th gen/Comet Lake processors, that's the kind of uplift you can expect from 8400 to 12400, as they are both 6 core parts.

If you get a higher clocked part than the 12400, expect a proporsional performance increase. There's also more cache per core on the higher end models, which will improve performance a little more.

Z690 DDR4 boards are already available for Alder Lake, with cheaper chipsets coming around March 2022, so you can keep your existing RAM if you want to.
 
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Lol wut, a 12400 can keep up with the 5600X, and it will be fairly cheap. Why buy a 14nm process Skylake CPU in 2021/2022? You'd also need an expensive, beefy cooler to run the 9900K at 5ghz on all cores.

12700K / KF if you want 8 large cores + 4 'Comet Lake' equivalent cores, clocked lower.

Another option would be to get a cheap AM4 board + Zen 3 + extra cache, but you'd need to wait until next year. Should be a good option if you want more than 8 high performance cores.
 
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