Just a upgrade question

Knin3 · 28 Mar 2022 at 19:53

Hey guys,

Really all im here to ask is wether its now a gd time to upgrade my cpu, board and memory. Before the ddr5 prices were a little steep but ive just looked and you can now get top end for £300 at 32gb. Although this is far from cheap its just about payable n im not sure if itll come down at all. I currently have a 9900k with maximus hero xi and 32gb ddr 4. Im looking to upgrade to a similar standing cpu and set up with ddr5 from the latest generation. What do you guys think, is it time yet?

I really appreciate any thoughts you can give me, id really have no clue without you kind souls

Thankyou

Puppetmaster · 28 Mar 2022 at 20:23

Do you need the increase in CPU performance / DDR5? If not then its better to wait for future releases and DDR5 to improve in terms of performance & cost. It doesn't really offer much benefit over DDR4 currently.

Knin3 · 28 Mar 2022 at 23:15

Well yes I do for my vr games, but not for pancake so its a yes and no really. Can the new cpus support both 4 and 5 or is it a 5 only thing?

Puppetmaster · 28 Mar 2022 at 23:27

There are boards that support DDR4 and boards that support DDR5 but not both afaik.

Gavin D Staveley · 25 Apr 2022 at 15:19

It would be worthwhile looking into the possibility that the speed of ddr5 may be unnoticeable in comparison to ddr4 particularly for gaming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wQ9MGrTvwc&t=174s

DDR5 seems to only make sense for workstations with heavy sustained processing (and for that I would be looking at high-end core i9, xeon with ecc ram or go berserk with amd threadripper).

The current machine appears to be at most 3.5 years old based on release dates suggesting quite a few years of life left in it i would expect, so I would hold off unless the performance is no longer adequate for your needs to an extend worth parting with the cash.

Tetras · 25 Apr 2022 at 16:00

Knin3 said:
What do you guys think, is it time yet?

If you only game, then no, the 9900K has plenty of life left in it and especially at high resolutions with modern GPUs there's not much point.

If you do productivity stuff, then the new CPUs can make a huge difference to e.g. render times.

DDR5 is not cheap enough yet, you're paying double for the same capacity in DDR4.

throwaway4372 · 25 Apr 2022 at 16:05

I'd say give it a year or two.