Is it worth it to upgrade from an i7 3770?

[Special Agent 星雨]

My current setup is:

 

CPU: i7 3770

Cooler: Coolermaster Hyper212X

RAM: 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz

GPU: MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X

PSU: Corsair HX650

Storage: 120GB Kingston SSD for OS, 750GB Crucial SSD for games + 1TB external HDD for other stuff.

 

I've seen a huge improvement in gaming performance after upgrading to a GTX 1070, however I am now seeing what appears to be CPU bottlenecks when I'm in the middle of certain games.

 

So my question is, is it time to upgrade my CPU? Would it be worth it to upgrade to an i7 7700 (I'm not interested in overclocking) or one of the new Ryzen chips?

[genexis_x]

No need to upgrade. i7 can last for a long time.

[Hunter06]

upgrading to 7700 will increase some performance but is it worth the whole upgrade (new cpu+mobo+ram)....nope

ryzen sadly not recommend over 7700 in gaming

[crash4fun]

Ryzen will be better once games are more consistently released with better multi-threading support / DX12. It is a completely new architecture and a better future proofing option then a 7700, but if you demand the best performance RIGHT NAO, then go with a 7700.

 

What games are you having an issue with? I have an i7 3770 and all I can say is good RAM does help. If you have poor timings @ 1600mhz that could be a problem. I have 2400mhz RAM with decent timings and it seems to improve minimum frame issues if you have them.

 

Overall I'd say keep what you have until Intel puts out a repsonse to RyZen, or AMD releases the 6c / 12t RyZen as that should be cheaper and a more realistic gaming CPU.

[PCGuy_5960]

16 minutes ago, Special Agent 星雨 said:

So my question is, is it time to upgrade my CPU? Would it be worth it to upgrade to an i7 7700 (I'm not interested in overclocking) or one of the new Ryzen chips?

Still, get the 7700K, it is better out of the box and you have the option of overclocking.

Ryzen is not a good gaming CPU and your 3770K will be on par with it in most games....

[DexterSmythe]

19 minutes ago, Hunter06 said:

upgrading to 7700 will increase some performance but is it worth the whole upgrade (new cpu+mobo+ram)....nope

ryzen sadly not recommend over 7700 in gaming

Not Ryzen 7 at least. Ryzen 5 might have better single core performance for games though due to it's higher clocks.

[Special Agent 星雨]

18 minutes ago, ZM Fong said:

No need to upgrade. i7 can last for a long time.

It certainly has, I bought my i7 3770 on release and it hasn't skipped a beat, but after my GPU upgrade recently it's been hitting the 100% usage mark a lot more than I would like.

17 minutes ago, Hunter06 said:

upgrading to 7700 will increase some performance but is it worth the whole upgrade (new cpu+mobo+ram)....nope

ryzen sadly not recommend over 7700 in gaming

The effort required for this upgrade concerns me more since money isn't an issue, if after all these upgrades and I'm only seeing an extra 10 FPS .... it'll be disappointing to say the least. I watched some Ryzen videos already and it seems like the 8C/16T Ryzen 7s are not ideal or a "value" buy for gaming which makes me want to go with an i7 7700

 

14 minutes ago, crash4fun said:

Ryzen will be better once games are more consistently released with better multi-threading support / DX12. It is a completely new architecture and a better future proofing option then a 7700, but if you demand the best performance RIGHT NAO, then go with a 7700.

 

What games are you having an issue with? I have an i7 3770 and all I can say is good RAM does help. If you have poor timings @ 1600mhz that could be a problem. I have 2400mhz RAM with decent timings and it seems to improve minimum frame issues if you have them.

 

Overall I'd say keep what you have until Intel puts out a repsonse to RyZen, or AMD releases the 6c / 12t RyZen as that should be cheaper and a more realistic gaming CPU.

Not frame drops, just frame rates in general, before my GPU upgrade my CPU usage never even went close to 100%, but now its hitting that mark quite often, most noticeably in Rainbow Six: Siege which is the game I play most often. I sometimes get 100fps with CPU usage @ 100%. I also think your point is valid, buying Kabylake right now wouldn't be logical because Intel's next generation (response) to AMD Ryzen would most likely be more value for the money.

9 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Still, get the 7700K, it is better out of the box and you have the option of overclocking.

Ryzen is not a good gaming CPU and your 3770K will be on par with it in most games....

 

Makes sense, I've always seen people get triggered when someone buys a K CPU from intel and doesn't overclock, I will consider a K chip even though I won't overclock.

[PCGuy_5960]

Just now, Special Agent 星雨 said:

Makes sense, I've always seen people get triggered when someone buys a K CPU from intel and doesn't overclock, I will consider a K chip even though I won't overclock.

Yeah, this would be a good choice, as you have the option of overclocking, if you ever want to do that 

[Special Agent 星雨]

2 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Yeah, this would be a good choice, as you have the option of overclocking, if you ever want to do that 

True, perhaps after investing in a K CPU I'll be checking out my BIOS instead of linustechtips.com if I need more performance.

[Special Agent 星雨]

Thanks everyone for your responses! I've decided that I will wait until Intel's Cannonlake CPUs and buy an overclockable (presumed name) i7 8700k.

[SteveGrabowski0]

If you're running a 60 Hz panel then stick with the i7-3770, it's more than enough to push that. If you're running a 144 Hz 1080p panel you should get an i7-7700k and overclock the shit out of it, because you're going to be cpu bound in most games at 1080p with a GTX 1070.

[crash4fun]

Agreed on the 60hz panel, OP what kind of panel do you use?

 

Also I did a ninja edit there I didn't mean frame drops, more min frame rates. I have very consistent frame rates on my setup.

 

I know a lot of people really love the 7700k, and it's quite good don't get me wrong but I remember back when the same debate happened over Core 2 Duo, having a dual core vs having a quad core was a heated debate and people were right in declaring that after overclocking, a 3.8ghz dual core would beat a 3.6ghz quad core in most games. However a year or two later pretty much every game utilized a 4 core system. So yeah now we're looking at base clocks and overclocking capability of these chips, 4c/8t vs 8c/16t.... I think the same is going to happen here so unless you upgrade every year, I don't see the sense in getting an i7 7700K personally. It is already proven what DX12 and Vulkan are capable of, and these API's have been out in the wild for a little while now.

[SteveGrabowski0]

35 minutes ago, crash4fun said:

Agreed on the 60hz panel, OP what kind of panel do you use?

 

Also I did a ninja edit there I didn't mean frame drops, more min frame rates. I have very consistent frame rates on my setup.

 

I know a lot of people really love the 7700k, and it's quite good don't get me wrong but I remember back when the same debate happened over Core 2 Duo, having a dual core vs having a quad core was a heated debate and people were right in declaring that after overclocking, a 3.8ghz dual core would beat a 3.6ghz quad core in most games. However a year or two later pretty much every game utilized a 4 core system. So yeah now we're looking at base clocks and overclocking capability of these chips, 4c/8t vs 8c/16t.... I think the same is going to happen here so unless you upgrade every year, I don't see the sense in getting an i7 7700K personally. It is already proven what DX12 and Vulkan are capable of, and these API's have been out in the wild for a little while now.

Intel's octacore is $1000 though and AMD's $500 octacore can only match a stock i5-4690k in Battlefield 1, which is supposed to love moar corez. With the consoles having octacores with really weak IPC the mainstream i7 seems like it's going to be the sweet spot this console generation (and most AAA games are designed for the PS4/XB1 first and foremost). Perhaps when Skylake X and KabyLake X release at the end of the summer X299 will make sense for gamers since you'll get the extra cores with the IPC gains Skylake brought, but Broadwell E doesn't seem to overclock well and thus doesn't make much sense for gaming. We saw the big move where HT in the consumer i7 finally started showing benefits over the straight quadcore i5 in 2014 right after this generation of consoles launched. I doubt we'll see another jump like that until 2020 or so once the next generation of consoles launch.

[crash4fun]

46 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Intel's octacore is $1000 though and AMD's $500 octacore can only match a stock i5-4690k in Battlefield 1, which is supposed to love moar corez. With the consoles having octacores with really weak IPC the mainstream i7 seems like it's going to be the sweet spot this console generation (and most AAA games are designed for the PS4/XB1 first and foremost). Perhaps when Skylake X and KabyLake X release at the end of the summer X299 will make sense for gamers since you'll get the extra cores with the IPC gains Skylake brought, but Broadwell E doesn't seem to overclock well and thus doesn't make much sense for gaming. We saw the big move where HT in the consumer i7 finally started showing benefits over the straight quadcore i5 in 2014 right after this generation of consoles launched. I doubt we'll see another jump like that until 2020 or so once the next generation of consoles launch.

Sounds like a conclusion of the GamerNexus benchmarks right? They fail to mention whether this is single or multiplayer, it is well known that BF1 uses more threads in multiplayer games, and typically benchmarking is done on single player. Also the difference in results is marginal here. Also if you're going to press on those results specifically, he may as well get an i5 because the difference is marginal here too.

 

New consoles have 8 core processors, 4C/8T is not superior to 8C/16T in properly optimized games for 8 working threads. This also proves that PC ports don't always work exactly like console ports.

 

I think it is far too quick to make a conclusion on RyZen, like I said before it's a new architecture and AMD is well known for putting out improvements shortly after release. Encouraging people to continue adapting 4C/8T processors is going to hurt end user experience in the long run because instead of developing for 8C/16T like they should, developers will be like "well most people have 4C/8T anyway". So personally I'd rather see people adopt hardware with far more potential instead of using lesser hardware because it works better RIGHT NAO. In this case we're not talking about a huge difference in performance either, and the price is good. You named the highest priced RyZen, they go down to $329 for the 1700.

 

And finally, you also need to consider whether people load up a game & that is it, or if they load up a game & keep dozens of chrome tabs open, run other programs in the background, stream etc. Benchmarks are not real world results, they are just benchmarks. People still bought i7's back when i5's were recommended for gaming because they wanted some headroom. If you're going to recommend a new gaming machine to someone, recommend something with a little future proofing in it unless they have specifically stated they like to upgrade every year. This guy is coming from an Ivy bridge processor so I'm assuming he likes to upgrade ever 3-4 years.

[SteveGrabowski0]

27 minutes ago, crash4fun said:

Sounds like a conclusion of the GamerNexus benchmarks right? They fail to mention whether this is single or multiplayer, it is well known that BF1 uses more threads in multiplayer games, and typically benchmarking is done on single player. Also the difference in results is marginal here. Also if you're going to press on those results specifically, he may as well get an i5 because the difference is marginal here too.

 

New consoles have 8 core processors, 4C/8T is not superior to 8C/16T in properly optimized games for 8 working threads. This also proves that PC ports don't always work exactly like console ports.

 

I think it is far too quick to make a conclusion on RyZen, like I said before it's a new architecture and AMD is well known for putting out improvements shortly after release. Encouraging people to continue adapting 4C/8T processors is going to hurt end user experience in the long run because instead of developing for 8C/16T like they should, developers will be like "well most people have 4C/8T anyway". So personally I'd rather see people adopt hardware with far more potential instead of using lesser hardware because it works better RIGHT NAO. In this case we're not talking about a huge difference in performance either, and the price is good. You named the highest priced RyZen, they go down to $329 for the 1700.

 

And finally, you also need to consider whether people load up a game & that is it, or if they load up a game & keep dozens of chrome tabs open, run other programs in the background, stream etc. Benchmarks are not real world results, they are just benchmarks. People still bought i7's back when i5's were recommended for gaming because they wanted some headroom. If you're going to recommend a new gaming machine to someone, recommend something with a little future proofing in it unless they have specifically stated they like to upgrade every year. This guy is coming from an Ivy bridge processor so I'm assuming he likes to upgrade ever 3-4 years.

Battlefield 1 uses all 8 threads of my Xeon E3-1231v3 in single player. And the R7 1800X performs like a stock i5-6600k for minimums in Watch Dogs 2, or a stock i5-7600k for averages. Even if the R7 1700 can match that with an overclock that's still nothing to write home about when the chip costs $90 more and will never approach the clockspeeds the 6600k and 7600k can. Digital Foundry benchmarked the i7-6700k against the i7-5820k and i7-5960x, all with overclocked RAM and at 1080p with a Titan X (Maxwell though, Pascal wasn't out) and the 6700k beat the pants off the other two cpus, and these are in games that can run across at least 8 threads. That benchmark was a real eye opener because I always just assumed games that ran better on i7 vs i5 would really run well having the actual extra cores. They don't. The 4C/8T cpu is better than the 8C/16T cpu in games that run well on 8 threads. The future proofing argument is crazy, I heard the same thing from FX owners about how games scaling to 8 threads would mean their FX-8350 would be better than the i5-4690k. The scaling to 8 threads happened but the FX chips never hit this supposed potential they had. Ryzen is a solid architecture for workstation applications but unless there is something with R7 1800X level gaming performance or better for $240 or so it's not going to be worth recommending to people looking to make a strictly gaming build.

[Special Agent 星雨]

On 3/4/2017 at 3:38 AM, crash4fun said:

Agreed on the 60hz panel, OP what kind of panel do you use?

 

Also I did a ninja edit there I didn't mean frame drops, more min frame rates. I have very consistent frame rates on my setup.

 

I know a lot of people really love the 7700k, and it's quite good don't get me wrong but I remember back when the same debate happened over Core 2 Duo, having a dual core vs having a quad core was a heated debate and people were right in declaring that after overclocking, a 3.8ghz dual core would beat a 3.6ghz quad core in most games. However a year or two later pretty much every game utilized a 4 core system. So yeah now we're looking at base clocks and overclocking capability of these chips, 4c/8t vs 8c/16t.... I think the same is going to happen here so unless you upgrade every year, I don't see the sense in getting an i7 7700K personally. It is already proven what DX12 and Vulkan are capable of, and these API's have been out in the wild for a little while now.

For my main monitor, I use an Asus VG248QE, so high frame rates are really important for me.

[Special Agent 星雨]

On 3/4/2017 at 5:30 AM, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Battlefield 1 uses all 8 threads of my Xeon E3-1231v3 in single player. And the R7 1800X performs like a stock i5-6600k for minimums in Watch Dogs 2, or a stock i5-7600k for averages. Even if the R7 1700 can match that with an overclock that's still nothing to write home about when the chip costs $90 more and will never approach the clockspeeds the 6600k and 7600k can. Digital Foundry benchmarked the i7-6700k against the i7-5820k and i7-5960x, all with overclocked RAM and at 1080p with a Titan X (Maxwell though, Pascal wasn't out) and the 6700k beat the pants off the other two cpus, and these are in games that can run across at least 8 threads. That benchmark was a real eye opener because I always just assumed games that ran better on i7 vs i5 would really run well having the actual extra cores. They don't. The 4C/8T cpu is better than the 8C/16T cpu in games that run well on 8 threads. The future proofing argument is crazy, I heard the same thing from FX owners about how games scaling to 8 threads would mean their FX-8350 would be better than the i5-4690k. The scaling to 8 threads happened but the FX chips never hit this supposed potential they had. Ryzen is a solid architecture for workstation applications but unless there is something with R7 1800X level gaming performance or better for $240 or so it's not going to be worth recommending to people looking to make a strictly gaming build.

I agree, if Ryzen 5 (6C/12T) CPUs still can't compete with Intel's i5 or i7 for that matter, I think I'll continue buying Intel. I only do gaming so that is what matters to me. For video production and/or other multi-threaded workloads I can see Ryzen being a popular choice.