PC Upgrade Help

FightingFirst

FightingFirst

FightingFirst

Associate
Joined
21 Jul 2010
Posts
150
Hi

I came on here asking for some upgrade advice originally and the good people of OCUK provided. Off that advice, I decided to wait for AMD's GPU offering and was unfortunately disappointed on the price so I decided to sit the current Nvidia and AMD GPUs out. I luckily managed to get a very good deal on 3070 to keep me going in the mean time. The rest of my system is now a bottleneck.

What would people suggest I should upgrade? I would be exclusively gaming and only very mildly overclocking the CPU/GPU. I haven't really got a budget in mind currently but I would like to strike a good balance between cost and performance. I would ideally like to keep things that wont degrade performance which by my reckoning will be the Case, GPU and the monitor. I will probably look to target the next release of GPUs (Nvidia 5000 series) so would want a system that is somewhat futureproofed for a little while. Im hoping to change my upgrade cycle to having to upgrade the GPU one year and then the next year or so I can upgrade the rest etc rather than at the moment I upgrade everything at once. I would want intel cpus because it is what I always have built my PCs with. Would I be better off with Raptor lake or should I go for the older Alder lake? Also, is DDR5 worth getting now or am I better off with DDR4?

Any help/build lists would be much appreciated.

Many thanks.

My current system:
MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming Z Trio 8G LHR
Gigabyte X99-SLI
Intel Core I7 5820k
Corsair Hydro H115i CPU Cooler
XFX XTR 850W '80 Plus Gold' FUlly Modular PSU
Fractal Design R5 Midi Tower Case
Samsung 250 GB 850 Evo SSD
Seagate Baracuda 2 TB 7200RMP 6 GBs
16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 RAM
Samsung G7 27 inch 1440p monitor.
 
FightingFirst said:
Would I be better off with Raptor lake or should I go for the older Alder lake?
Click to expand...

For gaming only, the 13600K pretty much obsoleted everything from the 12600K up, so no, I don't think so. I wouldn't recommend you go lower than the 13600K if you're planning an upgrade to a 5000 series at 1440p.

My only concern with the 13600K is that since unlike AM5 there's going to be limited upgrade potential on the Intel socket (rumours of a raptor lake refresh, but that should be the last upgrade, assuming it happens), it might be worth pushing upwards to the i7, so that you'll have 8 P-cores for the longer term. The 13700 non-K is an interesting CPU, but I haven't seen any reviews yet and I'm not sure how 'overclocking' is going to work, since you could effectively overclock the 12700 non-K by increasing the stock power limits.

Since your current DDR4 is only 16GB and very slow, I'd switch to DDR5 now.
 
Thanks for the above.

Would something like this work:
My basket at OcUK:

Total: £981.90 (includes delivery: £7.99)​



​

I am assuming my current PSU would still manage. Also, I seem to recall Corsair released an adapter for the LGA1700 socket so i can still use my current cpu cooler. Would just need more thermal paste if I'm correct
 
You can get 5600 memory for the same money (not sure OCUK has stock, but you can buy it elsewhere), or OCUK has a Kingston XMP-based 6000 kit for £170.

I'd replace the 1TB QVO with M.2 drives (or a single 2TB drive) like the WD SN770 (review). SATA is really dated now and I don't believe it supports DirectStorage. Those drives are also QLC-based which makes them slow (review), with poor endurance (QVO 1TB warranty is 360 TBW, whereas the SN770 is 600 TBW).

I'd get the K version of the CPU, it is worth £20 for the troubleshooting benefit alone, but it is actually not that bad (you can even play some older games at 720p/1080p if you're desperate).

PSU should be fine.

Cooler: hmm, you might want to read this. If that's true, OCUK stock it here.
 
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FightingFirst said:
Yeah I think I've just shown that when i built a pc last time....it was a while back. M.2 wasn't on the block then

I'll swap out the ram as you suggest and the CPU.
Click to expand...

Just FYI: I edited my post about the cooler, because it looks like Corsair's bracket is not compatible. Though, I think it needs more research before you buy anything since I only did a quick googlage.
 
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