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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

I have a 5 year old Intel i7 CPU. Not to diverge too far from the topic, but would I have any reason to upgrade my CPU for gaming?

I assume swapping my GTX 760 with a latest generation card would give me better gaming performance.

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This should be easy for you to test. Play the game you want, at the settings you want. If the cpu is running at 100%, get a faster CPU; if it's not, get a faster GPU.

I'm in a similar-ish boat. I've got an i5-6600k with a solid overclock on it. Single core performance is completely modern competitive, but it falls very flat in multicore.

Most games will get a huge bump just with a new GPU - You'd do well with an RTX 2070, or the next generation AMD GPUs (speculating - but there's a lot of momentum on that front).

That being said - LinusTechTips did a head to head benchmark comparison between the i7-7700k (the latest my Z170 chipset can handle) and this 3300X. Bottom line - the 3300X is an insanely good value for performance.

Depends which one - I have a 4790K + a GTX1080Ti and I see absolutely no reason to upgrade. There are no games that I cannot play at near max settings in 1440p. The only game that has somewhat stretched the CPU is Satisfactory, but then I think all machines struggle with it once you have a large enough factory.

as always, no need to upgrade if you're happy with your current setup. you're definitely leaving some performance on the table with that combo though. I just upgraded 4670K -> 9700K also with a 1080 ti and I've seen some nice fps boosts in most of the games I play. as an added benefit, it's an absolute beast for c++ compilation. takes less than half the time to build compared to my actual work computer with a 7700.

You'd be surprised how much better CPUs have gotten over the last five years. Even though the clocks might look roughly similar, overall performance has gone up by quite a bit. You probably only have 4 cores on a 2015 i7, too, and 8+ cores are standard now for high-end CPUs.

Whether it'll make an immediate difference to you is game-dependent, but if you play a lot of AAA titles I'd definitely look to upgrade soon.

For most games, I'd expect a 4700k + rtx 2060 to outdo e.g. a r5 3600 + gtx760, as similar priced upgrade options (once you factor in a new motherboard and ddr4 ram) in the tier of your current GPU.

That said, there are cpu heavy games out there, like MMOs with high on screen player counts, simulations like Cities Skylines or flight sims, so your mileage may vary.

Absolutely no doubt a GPU upgrade would be the way to go in your situation. A 2015 i7 can still keep up with a monster GPU such as the RX5600XT or RX5700XT.

Unless you're streaming or doing something that is causing you to be CPU bound? Unlikely. At a minimum I'd wait for the Zen 3 parts at this point.

In your case, it is quite likely that the GPU is the better money for an upgrade.

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