Upgrade advice ...

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16 Jul 2011
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Hi,

I've an I7 4790K at 4K I bought mayve 10 years ago, that I upgraded a few years later with an RTX2080 gpu.

At the time of the GPU upgrade, I read that GPU would be held back a bit by the CPU.

I'm now planning to buy a new PC, replace the whole lot as it's all old, & not cutting it - quite - on better games. Ideally I'd want a GPU with 24GB of VRAM but looks like I can forget that for a year or two, so will likely go for a 5070 or 5070TI for a year or two.

Is there any grade of CPU I should buy now that would make full use of the oh so slow to arrive 24GB cards en route such as the 5080 SUPER?

Ty.
 
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Is there any grade of CPU I should buy now that would make full use of the oh so slow to arrive 24GB cards en route such as the 5080 SUPER?
Generally acceptable baseline for modern cards is an entry-level AM5 CPU (e.g. 7600/9600) or a 12th gen -K CPU. You can get more out of them with better, but they're acceptable stopgaps. The price of DDR5 however, is not a stopgap :o

If you want a "state of the market" type summary, look up the reviews of the 250K and 270K, since they will include most competing CPUs in the comparison.

Unless confirmed otherwise, I would avoid: asrock motherboards (AMD) and 13th-14th gen CPUs, especially used 13th-14th CPUs.
 
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Newest, Intel 250 or 270. Supposedly Intel is planning on maintaining socket support for longer, but what that means is anyone's guess.

Longevity, AM5 is a safe bet. Zen 7 should be supported when it lands in 2028, so you'd have an upgrade path. Depending on your budget, 9800x3d or the newer 9850x3d are great for pure gaming. If you've got cash/need more cores for productivity, 9900x3d or 9950x3d.
 
If it's gaming and you want the best for 'gaming', then the bestcat the mo is the 9800x3d cpu. Am5 will be upgradeable too.
The new 270k plus intel CPU is a good all rounder if you want a CPU for more than just gaming and plan to do productivity etc. the next intel CPUs will be on a different platform though so there won't be an upgrade path
 
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