PC Upgrade Suggestions

XavierVairo · December 6, 2018

Hi everyone, I'm looking to upgrade my nearly 6 year old gaming system. I'll give you my current specs, for reference.

i5-3570K OCed to 4.1GHz
Asus P8Z77-V LK MBD
Asus GTX 980 STRIX GBGDDR5
16GB (4X4GB) Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz
Corsair Air 540 Case
Corsair RM 850W Power Supply
Corsair H110i AIO Cooler
Windows 10 Home 64 Bit
Asus ROG Swift 1440p 144Hz Monitor
2 Asus 1080p monitors (not used for gaming)
Kingston 120GB SSD as a boot drive
1 WD Black 7200 for game storage and a random 1TB Seagate HDD for all other storageI

The main reason for this upgrade is that I have to play most of the big titles at medium to low at 1440p (Far Cry 5, Forza: Horizon 4, Battlefield 1, etc.) to get anywhere near my monitor's 144Hz with G-Sync on. I've also noticed just general slow down of my PC (freshly restored Windows to Factory settings and formatted both HDD's) and a couple USB's on the back of the Motherboard seem to be dying. I'd like to mainly upgrade the Motherboard, RAM, and CPU to the most current generation possible, with a GPU Upgrade later down the line. I live in the United States for pricing. Here is the system I have built on UserBenchmark:

i5 9600K
Asus PRIME Z390-A
Asus RTX 2070 Overclocked
16GB (2x8) Corsair RGB PRO DDR4 3000MHz
The Same Case
The Same PSU
Windows 10 64 Bit
Same H110i AIO Cooler
Same Monitors
Same Kingston SSD for boot drive
Same HDD's as before

The reason I'm asking for help is that while the i5 9600K specs look good, I'm not against going with AMD. It seems like Ryzen (and Intel) have made the i5 a little pointless, but the i7 9700k is a little too pricey for me. I almost exclusively game on my PC, with some very light Photoshop use. Should I just get the i5 9600K? Should I bite the bullet and buy the i7 9700K? Should I avoid Coffee Lake all together? Should I wait for Ryzen Gen 3? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rex_G · December 6, 2018

8 minutes ago, XavierVairo said:

-Snip-

Ryzen is a good choice but if you want to stick to Intel, go with i5 8600K. The performance is almost same as 9600K and the extra cost is not worth it.

HarryNyquist · December 6, 2018

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-9600K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-2600X-vs-Intel-i5-8600K/3337vs3235vs3100

The only thing I'll say is that Intel is much much better with single-thread performance than AMD (as shown on the benchmark comparison there). If you're doing a lot of gaming I'd stick with Intel unless you want to upgrade to a Ryzen 7 2700X.

Also, I would recommend splurging and upgrading to Windows 10 Pro so you can configure away a lot of the problems (mostly) to your heart's content through gpedit instead of the registry.