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Upgrade from 3820 to 4960X worth it?

snedie

snedie

snedie

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Joined
26 Aug 2009
Posts
1,299
Looking to give a bit more life to an ageing system:

MB: Asus RIVE
Current CPU: Intel I7 3820
GPU: GTX 980TI
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro Red 16GB
Screen Res: 3840:2160

I'll be replacing the GPU with a 1080TI (or budget permitting a 2080) at the end of the year, should I consider upgrading the CPU first to a 4960X? They're very reasonably priced on fleabay these days, but as always GPU seems to offer the biggest bang for the buck.

Suggestions welcome :)
 
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It's not worth spending upwards of £200 on 7 year old hardware. That money could go towards a whole new CPU/motherboard/memory later on when you're ready.

It would be a different story if we were talking £15 for an old Xeon for example on a board that supported it but not £200.
 
Yea I keep thinking the exact same thing, throwing money at a dead horse etc. But a new mobo, CPU & memory is going to set me back a whole lot more than just a CPU, and for gaming CPU's really haven't provided much of a benefit for half a decade now so I'm struggling to justify replacing the base hardware to facilitate a more modern CPU.

There are also cheaper options such as the 4820K or the 3960X but those are barely a step up from the 3820 aside from the unlocked multiplier.
 
Unless you can find a 6 core / 12 thread or better cheap I wouldn't bother and a lot of the cheaper ones are low clock Xeons which aren't great for gaming unless they clock well.
 
I have my 3820 at 4.9 GHz.

I doubt a 4960x could make that speed. IPC improvements wouldn't be enough to to make it faster if it didn't clock well. But you get a couple of extra cores...

Depends, but not worth it imo.
 
just sell up now get a cheap 2700x set up or wait till summer and get new amd cpu or intel . its just not worth it 2nd hand now. you can buy cpus new as fast and as cheap as 2nd hand.unless its mega cheap.
 
The 4930k is better value and performs much the same. There's also E5-1XXX V2 cpus which IIRC are overclockable and good value for money.

IB-E will also get you 2400+ ram and PCIE 3.0 with nvidea cards without the need for hacks.

Is it worth spending money on a new cpu, board, ram when gaming at 4k and the limitation is the GPU? I'd say no.
 
snedie said:
There are also cheaper options such as the 4820K or the 3960X but those are barely a step up from the 3820 aside from the unlocked multiplier.
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The 3960X is a hexa core, so a pretty sizeable boost over the quad core 3820. I'd just grab the cheapest unlocked hexa core you can find. The extra cache on the X chips isn't worth much and presumably you'll be overclocking anyway. The 3930K goes for under £100... not sure about the Xeon equivalent. Sandy Bridge-E tends to clock a couple of hundred MHz higher than Ivy Bridge-E anyway, which eliminates the small IPC bump. There's the PCIe 3.0 consideration, but it's fully stable and working on my 3970X at least. Even have an NVMe SSD in there via an add-in card. 2400MHz DDR3 was also a non-issue for it. Managed to tighten the timings even.

I still plan to buy Zen 2 and this was only ever intended to be a temporary setup until then after I sold my 2700X, but there's still a ton of life left in the platform. I had a 1080 Ti paired with it until a couple of weeks ago and it was still a fantastic gaming setup. The only real downside is the power draw. It's no worse a gaming experience than my 2700X was, but it uses close to twice as much power. Not ideal, but not a factor that should be a consideration in terms of upgrading, since you'll never spend as much on power as you will on a new CPU/motherboard/DDR4. The chip does stay remarkably cool though. I've heard Ivy Bridge is worse in that respect due to the greater density.
 
Rroff said:
Depends what you are doing though - a lot of games still don't benefit from more than 8 threads whether 4 core / 8 thread or 8 real cores.
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Most "AAA" games these days make use of more than four threads these days (which is why quad core i5s are now often stutterfests), and a hexa core will start earning its keep at anything over four, since Hyperthreading/SMT is no substitute for a real core. There's no need for a game to use all twelve threads for there to be a performance uplift, since five threads and up are then being split amongst six real cores instead of four. Of course, that's entirely when comparing chips of the same (or roughly the same) single-threaded performance, as we are. Compare say a 7700K to a hexa core Sandy Bridge-E chip and their multi-threaded benchmark scores are very similar, since it has the extra single-threaded grunt to power through the physical core deficit.
 
Aretak said:
since Hyperthreading/SMT is no substitute for a real core
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No but a lot of games still only use 1 main logic thread and 1 main rendering thread (where IPC is still important) then a bunch of lighter worker threads/streaming IO that don't really need a real core but don't run smoothly if you only have 4 execution units - having 6 real cores over 4 core / 8 threads doesn't make much odds in a lot of games.

Not to say that will always be the way as games are increasingly taking advantage of extra cores.
 
Rroff said:
No but a lot of games still only use 1 main logic thread and 1 main rendering thread (where IPC is still important) then a bunch of lighter worker threads/streaming IO that don't really need a real core but don't run smoothly if you only have 4 execution units - having 6 real cores over 4 core / 8 threads doesn't make much odds in a lot of games.

Not to say that will always be the way as games are increasingly taking advantage of extra cores.
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Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I had a 2600K before I moved to Ryzen, running at 4.8GHz with 2133MHz DDR3, and it was a lot less of a smooth experience than the 3970X that I'm currently using. A lot more stutters and framerate drops that just aren't there with this setup. That was paired with the same 1080 Ti FTW3 that I used on both the Ryzen system and this one (before I sold it on here recently). So yeah, not gonna convince me I'm afraid, as I've experienced the difference between quad and hexa core Sandy Bridge first-hand. Of course there are still games which are highly dependent on a single thread, but big budget games from Western studios have been growing more and more multi-threaded for years.
 
If you can get the 4960X for a reasonable price but from the ones I've seen they sell for way over the odds. When I mean reasonable I mean for ~£120 or less. Most I've seen are going for over £150 and often over £200.

You should also consider the Xeon E5 1660 V2 which is almost exactly the same as the 4960X but can be had for less as they're not as popular. Even the 3930K's and Xeon E5 1650's might be worth it especially if you overclock them to ~4.5Ghz which most go to with little effort. They can be sourced for ~£70 and at that speed will run fine with a 1080TI. Those two extra cores over what you have currently will be a nice cost effective boost over the 4 cores you have now.

If you see a Xeon E5 1680 V2 (8 core) going for ~£200 then I'd definitely get one of those. ;)
 
You can get a 6 core unlocked Xeon for about £80. Clock it to 4.5 and it’ll last you for a while. I’ve got the same and it hold my water cooled 1080ti back a tiny little bit in games like battlefield and when I say that I’m talking at 100fps plus. You could grab a good clocking 3930k for even less. Also have you flashed your bios for NVME support? There are legs in your kit yet!!
 
BS Dave said:
Just seen you’re at 4K. Defo get a cheap 6core and clock it
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I did see that hence another reason for my reply.
There are those that reply 'get Ryzen' to almost all upgrade scenarios but as in this example i.e. gaming at 4k, the cost/ benefit of getting a 6 core Sandy or Ivy will outweigh those of getting DDR4/motherboard/CPU.
 
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