Need help on deciding whether its time to upgrade

[Dennis1562]

Hi everyone, it's my first time on the forum but Linus suggested I come here on the most recent WAN show. I wanted some advice and appreciate the help. So basically I am a gamer first and for most but my needs since I first did my build have changed. I have gotten into running virtual machines, gameplay recording, and using the Adobe sweet for a ton of college projects. My current rig is rocking a I7-4790k and I wanted to know if it was still a good processor to meet my needs or if it was finally time to consider upgrading. Like, are the gains there now for me to justify the higher cost. Plus if I did upgrade should I go with Ryzen or stay with Intel. To give some more perspective on the rest of the build and so you understand my budget. The PC uses a hero 6 motherboard from ASUS with 16GB of DDR3 Ram clocked at 2133mhz out of the box. I have a GTX 1080 Founders edition card with 6Tb of SSD storage and a 512GB Samsung 860 pro SSD for the boot drive. I also have a singular 3Tb hard drive. If you can't tell I use a ton of storage for things outside gaming haha. Anyway sorry if there was too much info here I don't know the standard for the forum and I appreciate any info provided. The important thing for me is that the cost stays below 2k that's basically my budget for a new CPU, Motherboard, Cooler if needed, and Ram. I really want something that will have better IPC than my current I7-4790K if I do upgrade. If anyone suggests overclocking I have to eek out some extra performance but sadly I didn't really win the lottery as I can only get a truly stable 4.5GHz clock across all cores. That's at 1.3V.

[amusedschrodinger]

Well, how's your current hardware working for you? The question will always be - do you need to upgrade or do you want to upgrade?

[leo1798]

8 minutes ago, Dennis1562 said:

Hi everyone, it's my first time on the forum but Linus suggested I come here on the most recent WAN show. I wanted some advice and appreciate the help. So basically I am a gamer first and for most but my needs since I first did my build have changed. I have gotten into running virtual machines, gameplay recording, and using the Adobe sweet for a ton of college projects. My current rig is rocking a I7-4790k and I wanted to know if it was still a good processor to meet my needs or if it was finally time to consider upgrading. Like, are the gains there now for me to justify the higher cost. Plus if I did upgrade should I go with Ryzen or stay with Intel. To give some more perspective on the rest of the build and so you understand my budget. The PC uses a hero 6 motherboard from ASUS with 16GB of DDR3 Ram clocked at 2133mhz out of the box. I have a GTX 1080 Founders edition card with 6Tb of SSD storage and a 512GB Samsung 860 pro SSD for the boot drive. I also have a singular 3Tb hard drive. If you can't tell I use a ton of storage for things outside gaming haha. Anyway sorry if there was too much info here I don't know the standard for the forum and I appreciate any info provided. The important thing for me is that the cost stays below 2k that's basically my budget for a new CPU, Motherboard, Cooler if needed, and Ram. I really want something that will have better IPC than my current I7-4790K if I do upgrade. If anyone suggests overclocking I have to eek out some extra performance but sadly I didn't really win the lottery as I can only get a truly stable 4.5GHz clock across all cores. That's at 1.3V.

If you can suffice, Zen 2 will be releasing relatively shortly and should provide substantial gains in productivity and gaming for a reasonable price, but if you must upgrade sooner rather than later, I'd go with a Ryzen 7 2700 and overclock it to the clocks of a 2700X or an Intel Core i7 8700K if you can find one for a reasonable price and in stock. Both will give you extra cores and handle productivity well with Ryzen having the advantage in virtual machines/streaming and Intel having the advantage in the Adobe suite. Get some 3200mhz DDR4 and a good mb and you'll see some substantial gains in some areas. But again, if you can, wait just a little bit longer and you won't be disappointed.

 

Also, I can direct you to a parts list or video build guide for such if needed.

[Dennis1562]

Current hardware is ok I guess its not really preventing me per say from doing the school projects but I feel like I am reaching the limits on what I can do with the machine. As an example, I would love to add more storage and have a board that can support NVMe drives that would be a huge help alone in speeding up things. I also don't feel like I can upgrade my GPU any further past say a 1080ti since the 4790k would bottleneck the RTX cards for 1080p gaming. When it comes to a recording when trying to game I can see a noticeable hit to performance both from added input lag and frame rate drops. 

[Dennis1562]

2 minutes ago, leo1798 said:

If you can suffice, Zen 2 will be releasing relatively shortly and should provide substantial gains in productivity and gaming for a reasonable price, but if you must upgrade sooner rather than later, I'd go with a Ryzen 7 2700 and overclock it to the clocks of a 2700X or an Intel Core i7 8700K if you can find one for a reasonable price and in stock. Both will give you extra cores and handle productivity well with Ryzen having the advantage in virtual machines/streaming and Intel having the advantage in the Adobe suite. Get some 3200mhz DDR4 and a good mb and you'll see some substantial gains in some areas. But again, if you can, wait just a little bit longer and you won't be disappointed.

 

Also, I can direct you to a parts list or video build guide for such if needed.

When will Zen 2 be revealed? I have no problems waiting a bit longer if it is worth it. I am the type of guy if you can't tell that dreads replacing my CPU since it usually means changing out the motherboard, ram, and cooler. I would say the longest I would be able to wait is till about July. The reason being is because the person that helped me build my machine will be moving so I wouldn't feel the best about trying to reinstall everything without him there even though I do my own maintenance all the time. It just feels different doing it from scratch especially if I went with AMD since I never really put a CPU in place before because I was scared to misalign the pins or something dumb.

[leo1798]

1 minute ago, Dennis1562 said:

Current hardware is ok I guess its not really preventing me per say from doing the school projects but I feel like I am reaching the limits on what I can do with the machine. As an example, I would love to add more storage and have a board that can support NVMe drives that would be a huge help alone in speeding up things. I also don't feel like I can upgrade my GPU any further past say a 1080ti since the 4790k would bottleneck the RTX cards for 1080p gaming. When it comes to a recording when trying to game I can see a noticeable hit to performance both from added input lag and frame rate drops. 

You shouldn't be bottlenecked if you're playing at 1440p or higher, and if you aren't already, you should make use of Nvidia's "ShadowPlay" which takes a minuscule amount of your GPU horsepower to do screen recording. I'm not sure how the exact settings work with Nvidia's software, but I know with AMD's ReLive that I can configure it quite extensively. Storage shouldn't be an issue to upgrade as SSD prices are at record lows, but you would need a newer platform for Nvme support, although most cheaper drives don't surpass the SATA 3 standard anyways. Basically, if you really feel like you need an upgrade, then by all means go ahead and pull the trigger, but you can still eek out a little bit of life from your system if you try. 

[xg32]

8 minutes ago, Dennis1562 said:

.

just wait for zen 2

[leo1798]

Just now, Dennis1562 said:

When will Zen 2 be revealed? I have no problems waiting a bit longer if it is worth it. I am the type of guy if you can't tell that dreads replacing my CPU since it usually means changing out the motherboard, ram, and cooler. I would say the longest I would be able to wait is till about July. The reason being is because the person that helped me build my machine will be moving so I wouldn't feel the best about trying to reinstall everything without him there even though I do my own maintenance all the time. It just feels different doing it from scratch especially if I went with AMD since I never really put a CPU in place before because I was scared to misalign the pins or something dumb.

Zen 2 will either release in January or March depending on what rumors are correct, but it is expected to bring higher core counts and significant performance gains for lower prices than intel across the board. Although if you go with AMD, you can upgrade your CPU at any time as AM4, which is the CPU socket, will be supported through 2020.

[Dennis1562]

1 minute ago, leo1798 said:

You shouldn't be bottlenecked if you're playing at 1440p or higher, and if you aren't already, you should make use of Nvidia's "ShadowPlay" which takes a minuscule amount of your GPU horsepower to do screen recording. I'm not sure how the exact settings work with Nvidia's software, but I know with AMD's ReLive that I can configure it quite extensively. Storage shouldn't be an issue to upgrade as SSD prices are at record lows, but you would need a newer platform for Nvme support, although most cheaper drives don't surpass the SATA 3 standard anyways. Basically, if you really feel like you need an upgrade, then by all means go ahead and pull the trigger, but you can still eek out a little bit of life from your system if you try. 

I game at 1080p on a 144hz monitor although at some point I will make the jump in resolution. I tried using Nvidas shadow play in the past but I saw a loss of about 30-45fps in games. Still reasonable as I was able to achieve 144+fps but also not stellar. Especially in games like PUBG where my machine really chugs for some reason despite me lowering a ton of settings. Yea upgrading storage isn't an issue I just need a fast NVME drive for the OS and so that when I am bringing over say a 4K video over to edit down for a project it doesn't take so long just to do things on the timeline. Also thank you both for replying I appreciate your guys time.

[LienusLateTips]

4 minutes ago, Dennis1562 said:

When will Zen 2 be revealed? I have no problems waiting a bit longer if it is worth it. I am the type of guy if you can't tell that dreads replacing my CPU since it usually means changing out the motherboard, ram, and cooler. I would say the longest I would be able to wait is till about July. The reason being is because the person that helped me build my machine will be moving so I wouldn't feel the best about trying to reinstall everything without him there even though I do my own maintenance all the time. It just feels different doing it from scratch especially if I went with AMD since I never really put a CPU in place before because I was scared to misalign the pins or something dumb.

Somewhere between January and March it'll be released.

 

There's a huge triangle on the side you can look at to make sure you don't misalign the pins, and on AMD CPUs the pins are a lot bigger and are straight instead of half bent on Intel, so they are hard to bent, and if you misalign they won't fit inside the socket.

[Dennis1562]

3 minutes ago, leo1798 said:

Zen 2 will either release in January or March depending on what rumors are correct, but it is expected to bring higher core counts and significant performance gains for lower prices than intel across the board. Although if you go with AMD, you can upgrade your CPU at any time as AM4, which is the CPU socket, will be supported through 2020.

Hmm ok, I guess I will just wait then. That gives me even more time to save money. Do you think it would be worthwhile to look at the thread ripper platform at all? Specifically to have access to extra PCIe lanes and quad channel memory. I wasn't planning on it because I doubt I would gain any real benefits from something like that but I figure I will ask. Again when it comes to my PC price isn't necessarily an issue. I want the best performance I can get for the money and 2k is the ballpark number I had for the budget.

[leo1798]

9 minutes ago, Dennis1562 said:

Hmm ok, I guess I will just wait then. That gives me even more time to save money. Do you think it would be worthwhile to look at the thread ripper platform at all? Specifically to have access to extra PCIe lanes and quad channel memory. I wasn't planning on it because I doubt I would gain any real benefits from something like that but I figure I will ask. Again when it comes to my PC price isn't necessarily an issue. I want the best performance I can get for the money and 2k is the ballpark number I had for the budget.

They're planning to bring 12-16 cores to the AM4 platform, so ThreadRipper will lose a little bit of luster for amateur content creators given that they usually don't update it until several months after mainstream Ryzen. Ryzen already has ECC memory support and a fair bit of PCIe lanes so it should suffice for your purposes, but if you're looking to get into more intensive rendering or heavier virtualization, then ThreadRipper would become a viable alternative, although with a higher motherboard cost and the requirement for a separate cooler.