I5 8400 upgrade?

MartinPrince · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:24

Armageus said:
But even if it does bottleneck, it doesn't matter assuming the OP is happy with performance.

People need to get out of this instant bottleneck=upgrade mindset.

The simple fact that he is posting here and also has "the feeling my cpu is a bottleneck for the GPU" would indicate he is not happy with performance.

g67575 · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:31

I've got a 10700K running at turbo speeds, so far it has been fast enough, but with 80-90% utilization in games like Watch Dogs: Legion during demanding scenes, there's not much leeway there.

jigger · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:34

MartinPrince said:
The simple fact that he is posting here and also has "the feeling my cpu is a bottleneck for the GPU" would indicate he is not happy with performance.

It’s exactly what I seen with Nvidia Ampere. Needs a really highend system behind it. My 5700XT was beating a RTX 3080 buy a large margin.

My pal had to go to a overclocked 5900X with 3800mhz RAM 1900mhz IF to completely resolve the issues with his RTX 3080.

thebandit · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:42

I think 2nd hand 9700 is good advise for a cheap speed bump to help the 3070 stretch its legs or alternatively just wait until Alderlake / AM4 new cache are out and everything is settled down, even if the new tech is beyond budget, the previous gen should drop down a bracket in price.

Muso · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:53

Wow suddenly a lot of information appeared on this thread, thanks guys.

So yes I'm not happy with performance, I checked the CPU utilisation and it's nearly always near enough 100%. I game in 2k, play a variety of games. Some games it's worse(new world is bad).

It doesn't sound like I'm going to get much of an upgrade unless I spend a lot of money so I will just have to put up with it for a while.

Cheers

jigger · 1 Nov 2021 at 12:55

Muso said:
Wow suddenly a lot of information appeared on this thread, thanks guys.

So yes I'm not happy with performance, I checked the CPU utilisation and it's nearly always near enough 100%. I game in 2k, play a variety of games. Some games it's worse(new world is bad).

It doesn't sound like I'm going to get much of an upgrade unless I spend a lot of money so I will just have to put up with it for a while.

Cheers

A 9900K overclocked to within a inch of its existence or a 5600X would be the only solution.

jigger · 1 Nov 2021 at 13:01

Another option would be put RTX card up for auction (£1 million quid) and buy a RX 6700XT. That would be pretty decent jump in graphics performance and probably leave you with some money over.

MartinPrince · 1 Nov 2021 at 13:40

jigger said:
A 9900K overclocked to within a inch of its existence or a 5600X would be the only solution.

No it isn't.

Even with Muso's current i5 8400 he is not that badly bottlenecked as he is playing at 1440p.

MartinPrince · 1 Nov 2021 at 13:50

jigger said:
Another option would be put RTX card up for auction (£1 million quid) and buy a RX 6700XT. That would be pretty decent jump in graphics performance and probably leave you with some money over.

That is not good advice. This is from the video that you posted yourself. Remember Muso is playing at 1440p...

An i3 10100 is pretty much the same performance as the I5 8400.

As you see even going to the 5600X there is very little improvement to be had with the 3070 at this resolution, though not the same for the 3090.

SeeNoWeevil · 1 Nov 2021 at 15:43

Not playing Ubisoft games is an instant 2 generation CPU upgrade.

g67575 · 1 Nov 2021 at 17:21

jigger said:
Another option would be put RTX card up for auction (£1 million quid) and buy a RX 6700XT. That would be pretty decent jump in graphics performance and probably leave you with some money over.

Changing a RTX 3070 for a RX 6700 XT would be a side grade, they are almost the same in performance. In some cases, the 6700 performs a bit less well, why bother? You'd wouldn't have DLSS, which in my opinion, would rule this out.

Buy a next gen CPU Intel or AMD CPU, if you don't have a high end cooler, a 9900K would be a waste of time. The clock frequency would only be 25% higher, going from a 8400 @4.0ghz to a 9900K clocked at 5.0ghz.

You can see in that benchmark there's a bottleneck problem on 11th gen or lower Intel CPUs in some games, although perhaps this matters much less with 8 cores or more.

G J · 1 Nov 2021 at 19:19

I was going to say get a 8700K as a few months ago the prices tanked on them right down too £130ish as I was going to sell mine and side grade to a 5600X for £150 but it wasnt worth it but now the prices on the 8700K have gone up to £170ish so its too expensive now.

A 9900 non K could be an option but its usually too close price wise to a 9900K which unless you can get one for a good price it isnt really worth it.

Wait for the Alderlake reviews (this week I think) then see where things lie.

jigger · 2 Nov 2021 at 00:01

g67575 said:
Changing a RTX 3070 for a RX 6700 XT would be a side grade, they are almost the same in performance. In some cases, the 6700 performs a bit less well, why bother? You'd wouldn't have DLSS, which in my opinion, would rule this out.

Buy a next gen CPU Intel or AMD CPU, if you don't have a high end cooler, a 9900K would be a waste of time. The clock frequency would only be 25% higher, going from a 8400 @4.0ghz to a 9900K clocked at 5.0ghz.

You can see in that benchmark there's a bottleneck problem on 11th gen or lower Intel CPUs in some games, although perhaps this matters much less with 8 cores or more.

In this situation a RX 670XT is faster. Even the RX 5600XT would beat the RTX 3070.

jigger · 2 Nov 2021 at 00:09

jigger said:
The RTX 3070 will definitely bottleneck. The i5 8400 and RTX 3070 is pretty ugly hardware combination TBH.

MartinPrince said:
That is not good advice. This is from the video that you posted yourself. Remember Muso is playing at 1440p...

An i3 10100 is pretty much the same performance as the I5 8400.

As you see even going to the 5600X there is very little improvement to be had with the 3070 at this resolution, though not the same for the 3090.

I take it you just watched a few seconds of that video.

[/QUOTE]

MartinPrince · 2 Nov 2021 at 00:57

jigger said:
I take it you just watched a few seconds of that video

I had to watch the whole of it to see that graph which was towards the end. The devil is always in the detail.

You are taking a general talking point and then applying it across the board, without first establishing exactly how CPU limited he is in the first place. Your statement that "...5600X would be the only solution" is clearly proved not to be the case for him as he is playing at 1440p Ultra Quality and in the game they used, a 5600X showed little improvement over the I3 10100. (Which is virtually the same as his I5 8400)

The point you seem to be failing to grasp is that the resolution and quality settings will have a great impact on whether you are CPU bottlenecked by your Ampere GPU. Due to driver overheads you will be CPU limited sooner on the Ampere GPU than on the Radeon but there comes a point as you go up in resolution and quality when they would both be GPU bottlenecked. This was shown in the first video you linked to be around 1440p High Quality.

... if for example you're pairing a Ryzen 5 2600x with a RTX3070 and the goal is to game at 1440p using high quality visual settings, the increased CPU overhead shouldn't be too much of an issue there as the games will be primarily GPU limited more often than not...

So for Muso the OP, his probable best option is to stick with his I5 8400, and make sure his memory is running at XMP, cut down on background processes etc, and if he is so inclined to squeeze the last drop by overclocking both CPU and RAM. Otherwise wait until he knows for a fact that he will get a 50% (or whatever his threshold is) improvement in the games/resolution/quality settings he plays in before committing to upgrading whichever component.

g67575 · 2 Nov 2021 at 03:52

@Muso - How much money can you spent for an upgrade? The 12600K and 12700K cost between £255 to £380.

Plus another £150 or so on a Z690 motherboard. Then, you could keep using your current DDR4 RAM. Plus, upto another hundred for the CPU cooler. So, the cost would be between £500-£630.

But you could spend less if you buy a non K CPU, or a lower spec motherboard, in a few months time. I'd be inclined to wait for cheaper motherboards.

jigger · 2 Nov 2021 at 11:32

MartinPrince said:
I had to watch the whole of it to see that graph which was towards the end. The devil is always in the detail.

You are taking a general talking point and then applying it across the board, without first establishing exactly how CPU limited he is in the first place. Your statement that "...5600X would be the only solution" is clearly proved not to be the case for him as he is playing at 1440p Ultra Quality and in the game they used, a 5600X showed little improvement over the I3 10100. (Which is virtually the same as his I5 8400)

The point you seem to be failing to grasp is that the resolution and quality settings will have a great impact on whether you are CPU bottlenecked by your Ampere GPU. Due to driver overheads you will be CPU limited sooner on the Ampere GPU than on the Radeon but there comes a point as you go up in resolution and quality when they would both be GPU bottlenecked. This was shown in the first video you linked to be around 1440p High Quality.

So for Muso the OP, his probable best option is to stick with his I5 8400, and make sure his memory is running at XMP, cut down on background processes etc, and if he is so inclined to squeeze the last drop by overclocking both CPU and RAM. Otherwise wait until he knows for a fact that he will get a 50% (or whatever his threshold is) improvement in the games/resolution/quality settings he plays in before committing to upgrading whichever component.

The point I’m making is you get more performance out of an RDNA card than you will with an RTX card with a slower CPU. If your using a CPU like the i5 8400 at around 2-4 mega pixels you would be better off with a RDNA based card.

As the OP would like to run with his current system selling the RTX 3070 while prices are high and buying an RX 6700XT wouldn’t be a bad upgrade and might actually make him some money.

MartinPrince · 2 Nov 2021 at 14:35

jigger said:
The point I’m making is you get more performance out of an RDNA card than you will with an RTX card with a slower CPU. If your using a CPU like the i5 8400 at around 2-4 mega pixels you would be better off with a RDNA based card.

As the OP would like to run with his current system selling the RTX 3070 while prices are high and buying an RX 6700XT wouldn’t be a bad upgrade and might actually make him some money.

Unless you can 100% guarantee him that he will get a say 40% improvement when playing New World (which he is currently having issues with) at 1440p High Quality settings, between using a 6700XT and a 3070 then he would be stupid beyond measure to take this advice.

At that resolution and quality settings and going from the information available the difference is only going to be single digits at best which makes it a silly proposition and a waste of effort. As Steve said, at that resolution you will be more often GPU limited no matter what GPU you have.

Not to mention does he want to be loosing DLSS and better RTX performance? I think not.

jigger · 2 Nov 2021 at 14:39

MartinPrince said:
Unless you can 100% guarantee him that he will get a say 40% improvement when playing New World (which he is currently having issues with) at 1440p High Quality settings, between using a 6700XT and a 3070 then he would be stupid beyond measure to take this advice.

At that resolution and quality settings and going from the information available the difference is only going to be single digits at best which makes it a silly proposition and a waste of effort. As Steve said, at that resolution you will be more often GPU limited no matter what GPU you have.

Not to mention does he want to be loosing DLSS and better RTX performance? I think not.

DLSS is pretty pointless at 2k resolution and not many games support it. Plus RDNA2 is really strong around that resolution.

What is RTX performance. Take it you mean Ray Tracing?

MartinPrince · 2 Nov 2021 at 14:48

jigger said:
DLSS is pretty pointless at 2k resolution and not many games support it. Plus RDNA2 is really strong around that resolution.

What is RTX performance. Take it you mean Ray Tracing?

You still think it's worth swapping out a 6700XT for a 3070 is worth it for single digit improvement? I'm sure I've just seen you write elsewhere that ...

"upgrading a LGA 1700 system for 5% more performance will probably be somewhat mute."

You can't have it both ways...