My i7 2600K build is still good 10 years on - What current CPU has best VFM over the next 10 years?

ianh · 2 May 2020 at 17:26

Hi all,

My current PC was made back in 2010 with the following specs -

i7 2600K @ 4.6ghz
OcUK CPU Water-cooling with 120mm Rad
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev3.1 MoBo
16GB XMS3 DDR3 @ 1600
Nvidia GTX 580

In the ten years since buying I swapped GPU's from a 580 to a 780 to a 1070 and replaced the original "water-cooled CPU setup" with an Alpenfon Matterhorn Air Cooler (for less maintenance rather than for any extra performance), but thats all in 10 years and, with the constant GPU updates, it is still able to play all my games at 1080p at 60fps right now without issue and usually at the highest detail/quality levels.

However, while everything still works fine right now, I know that at some point my poor CPU/MoBo or RAM will eventually fail and I'll need to swap to a whole new setup but, having not had to worry about upgrades for such a long time I'm slightly "out of the loop" although a few Youtubers reviews are helping me catch up.

With that in mind I'm wondering what currently available CPU would be able to give me the same "still playable after 10 years with just GPU upgrades" i got from my 2600K for the best VFM (Value For Money) whilst doing so (no threadripper please

)?

Thanks!

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My own opinion is that I can't believe 4C/8T will still be adequate 10 years from now, I think 6C/12T would be the absolute bare minimum and it's more likely that 8C/16T and higher would be required to buy right now to still be considered adequate (with say 2 newer GPU's like I did) in a decades time.

Of course when I got the 2600K we had a 6+ year period where Intel's dominance effectively hamstrung home/game CPU development into "4C/8T only" for far longer than it should have been (with a static effect on "multi-core" games development too) plus we were generally "stuck" at 1080p for a long time. So now AMD's resurgence has seen home CPU core counts skyrocket and 4K and 144hz gaming taking off I can see the next decade being where games/software really starts to heavily leverage this new "core race" and it makes me wonder if even 8C/16T will be enough in a further 10 years time for whatever the future of PC's looks like?

Holst1981 · 2 May 2020 at 17:45

The 2600k was exceptional value and I dont think you will find a deal like that again.

I guess the closest currently available CPU would be the 3600x, but the 3700x is a bit more future proof.

My 3600 is barely stressed in any of the games I play and very few of them are utilising all the cores. I think its going to take quite a long time before 6 cores is insufficient for games, but there may be some outliers that really benefit from 8+ cores in the future. Im pretty confident a 3600x would be fine in most games in 5 years, hard to say about 10 years we may be forced to stream all our games by then

Skynet5 · 2 May 2020 at 17:47

My 3900x which cost me £350 will be the best. No doubt it.

Mcnumpty2323 · 2 May 2020 at 17:56

Main thing with the 2600k wasn't just cores/threads
It was a beast for overclocking too
Mines still rocking 5ghz for the guy I sold it too
3900x was my latest cpu and expecting it
To last a long time
No 5ghz sadly but sheer core count/threads ought to keep it valid for many years to come

wedrum · 2 May 2020 at 17:59

Keep it and invest in a new gpu when the latest ones come out.

ianh · 2 May 2020 at 18:29

wedrum said:
Keep it and invest in a new gpu when the latest ones come out.

Thats my plan so far as the 2600K still works fine, so it's more of a "when this eventually breaks" question.

Holst1981 said:
but there may be some outliers that really benefit from 8+ cores in the future. Im pretty confident a 3600x would be fine in most games in 5 years, hard to say about 10 years we may be forced to stream all our games by then

My thoughts are that now that the current PS5/Xbox X both have 8C/16T chips, meaning that games makers will start to leverage these new cores, that in 10 years time we'll have moved past this current 8c/16T area and who only knows what the later PS7/Xbox XXX consoles (and therefore games) will have, maybe 16C/32T? So would a current 8C/16T CPU now still be able to run the latest games then, not to mention that TV resolution will have changed yet again, we maybe at 16k gaming etc in a decade with 4k considered as "low res" as 1080p is currently compared to the new shiny 4k right now.

Holst1981 said:
The 2600k was exceptional value and I don't think you will find a deal like that again.

Yeah thats my concern. I'm not as big an enthusiast as I was in the 90's when I was swapping chips and GPUs yearly so now I just want to buy once, have it last a "long" time rather than replacing things every 2-3 years.

233 · 2 May 2020 at 19:28

Same dilemma here

a 2600k with a decent gpu still does the job

mines is currently sitting at a healthy 4.8ghz and deals with everything I throw at it

If only it wasn’t for that pesky upgrade itch

chaparral · 2 May 2020 at 19:55

Mcnumpty2323 said:
Main thing with the 2600k wasn't just cores/threads
It was a beast for overclocking too
Mines still rocking 5ghz for the guy I sold it too

I remember when i paid a fortune to upgrade from my 2600k@5100mhz to a 4770K@4700 and ended up with lower benchmark scores and lower FPS

Joxeon · 2 May 2020 at 20:13

I would go with the ryzen 5 3600 which will be good for a couple of years then Drop in 3900x/4900x/4950x which by then would be going cheap.

Don't forget you can still sell your old CPU mb ram and probably pay for the 3600 with the money raised.

edgedemon · 2 May 2020 at 20:20

233 said:
Same dilemma here

a 2600k with a decent gpu still does the job

mines is currently sitting at a healthy 4.8ghz and deals with everything I throw at it

If only it wasn’t for that pesky upgrade itch

Yep, I have started to get that itch as well, X79, 3930K and dual 290's, don't need to upgrade but after nearly 10yrs I too am wondering when it will go bang.

sideways14a · 2 May 2020 at 20:38

I have to shout out for the old 5820k - mines still happily churning away with decent grunt at 4.5Gs today and is still a decent chip
That said buying today ... it would have to be the 3700 or the 3900 - both epic grunt and good value. There will be price drops soon so the 3900 would prob be my choice unless the 3950x decides to drop to 500 notes... at which point... steal of the century.

Mcnumpty2323 · 2 May 2020 at 22:05

chaparral said:
I remember when i paid a fortune to upgrade from my 2600k@5100mhz to a 4770K@4700 and ended up with lower benchmark scores and lower FPS

Lol
Bet that was a bummer
My 2600k think has been only cpu I could run 5.2ghz but backed off to the magic 5ghz number as like a quiet pc
But for multitasking which I do a lot the 3900x just slaughters the 7700k
It replaced
So yeah think 3900x should last a long time and it's just great amd are making Intel shake up their game
Been a very long time coming

MasterOC · 2 May 2020 at 22:27

sideways14a said:
I have to shout out for the old 5820k - mines still happily churning away with decent grunt at 4.5Gs today and is still a decent chip.

Was my first foray into an enthusiast platform and wasn't disappointed, at the time previously running a 4770k I still found the extra cores and threads of value despite slightly lower per core IPC, prices were actually more reasonable then with my 5820k costing 300 notes to boot although motherboard cost made up for that. Held a lot of weird score records on HWbot with that chip. Now a chip half the cost can kick it to the kerb it's exciting times all over again.

To op

If buying now a 3700x offers tremendous value, and it's hard to ignore with prices crumbling even further, actually found an amazingly crazy deal on a 3900x for 300 notes from a well known store although since gone up another 25%.

2600/2700k are now lagging behind a fair chunk and it is showing its age for holding anything more than midrange GPU performance at any resolution and or Refresh rate but its only very recently this has become very evident.

chaparral · 2 May 2020 at 22:35

Mcnumpty2323 said:
Lol
Bet that was a bummer
My 2600k think has been only cpu I could run 5.2ghz but backed off to the magic 5ghz number as like a quiet pc

I broke two 2600k CPU's by overclocking them to high (or putting the voltage to high)

jigger · 2 May 2020 at 22:37

In ten years.... 64 core 128 threads?

McGraw · 2 May 2020 at 23:41

Got my 4790k for £240 in Aug 2014. Still hanging in there. So glad I didn’t get a 4690k.

OldKitMan · 3 May 2020 at 00:14

got a 2500k in mine at the moment running at 4.4 GHz - never been 100% sure of how to tinker with the voltages to push it higher so left it at 4.4 where it's rock solid.

Been keeping my eyes out for a 3770k to replace it to keep me going for a while but they don't seem to come up very often and those that do tend to be priced higher than I'm wanting to pay. I may just bite the bullet and go for a new system as Gamers Nexus did a great video on youtube the other day (10 Years of Intel CPUs Benchmarked: i7-930, 2600K, 4790K, & Everything Since (2020)) which was very interesting.

ianh · 3 May 2020 at 00:54

OldKitMan said:
I may just bite the bullet and go for a new system as Gamers Nexus did a great video on youtube the other day (10 Years of Intel CPUs Benchmarked: i7-930, 2600K, 4790K, & Everything Since (2020)) which was very interesting.

Just watched that, what a great video but I hope they do something similar for AMD so I could see a comparison across both platforms. I knew the IPC benefits of newer chips make a bigger difference than pure clock speed but I was surprised at how little that "real world" difference was across the 4C/8T i7 range in the video considering the CPU's spanned 6+ years like that, although the 8C/16T i9 9900K looked fantastic!

jigger said:
In ten years.... 64 core 128 threads?

I did look at a 24C/48T Threadripper purely for a giggle and the price was surprisingly decent I thought (£1900-ish for CPU/Memory/MoBo - what I'll be replacing in mine) but if we're at 16C/32T now with home CPU's will we get to a stage like the 6+ year 4C/8T "limit" where manufacturers deliberately "stagnate" the core race in future to allow software/game to catch-up to these huge core counts which means the 24C/48T would be extremely poor VFM?

pugheaven · 3 May 2020 at 13:36

If it ain't broke don't fix it? You could literally wait for the latest GPU's and upgrade that... and see how it all works out. I personally am staying X79 for many years to come assuming nothing breaks and mate, you've used that term a couple of times, no reason any of that would break. If you have the upgrade bug which a lot do, then are there any 6 core chips you could put in?

Example, 3 weeks ago I had a 4 core i7-3280 similar era to yourself. So, bought a i7-3970x Extreme 6 core which was epic, however last week I went 8 core... so any of those fit your board? That way saves coin for your GPU which is gonna give you more outright power in games than ANY cpu imho.

Mcnumpty2323 · 3 May 2020 at 15:20

chaparral said:
I broke two 2600k CPU's by overclocking them to high (or putting the voltage to high)

Ouch if new at the time that would have been painful and expensive
I always erred on the cautious side with
Cpu voltage even though custom
Watercooled
Luckily my 2600k was a really good sample so didn't have to worry about it