Worth it?

[blake h]

Hey All,

 

So I was wondering the value of/how much difference it would actually make to upgrade my motherboard.

 

Current setup:

i7-8700k @ 3.7 GHz

MSI B360M Gaming Plus

RTX 2070

16GB G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 3000MHz

 

will happily provide more details if needed but i figured those covered the most important bases. The other stipulation is that the board needs to be mATX for case compatibility.

 

Now, what I've seen/what I figure are probably my best bets are:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/GLL48d/asrock-z390m-pro4-micro-atx-lga1151-motherboard-z390m-pro4

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/DZCD4D/gigabyte-z390-m-gaming-micro-atx-lga1151-motherboard-z390-m-gaming

 

And that's where the vague title comes in. These two boards are obvious upgrades to the current B series. And while they're definitely not budget, they're also not prohibitively expensive and I feel would be a way to get a little more oomph out of the pc for as long as I run it before it requires a full replacement.

 

I guess I should also note that the setup's primary focus would be gaming, World of Warcraft specifically. I've been thinking about dabbling with streaming, and do some very, very light editing/coding work but that's about it.

 

Basically, this is kind of what I'm leaning towards, I just wanted to get some other opinions/feedback and see what some of my actual, finite pros and cons are with doing a motherboard upgrade like this.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Best,

 

 

[AndreiArgeanu]

If you plan to overclock then getting a Z390 board might be worth it, but otherwise you won't get much of a performance improvement by going with Z390 as 8th-9th gen intel cpu's and older, don't really benefit much from high frequency memory.

[blake h]

On 12/20/2020 at 2:47 PM, AndreiArgeanu said:

If you plan to overclock then getting a Z390 board might be worth it, but otherwise you won't get much of a performance improvement by going with Z390 as 8th-9th gen intel cpu's and older, don't really benefit much from high frequency memory.

 

 

Thank you. This is the sort of info i was looking for. I have been considering overclocking. And my current thermal state is well, I've got some headroom I think. I've actually noticed recently that when trying to do an XTU benchmark my cpu utilization stays super low (15-20%) and my highest temp measured is 63C. Not real sure what gives there, but am looking into it. And I guess if maybe you have any input in that department as well?

 

[AndreiArgeanu]

49 minutes ago, blake h said:

I've actually noticed recently that when trying to do an XTU benchmark my cpu utilization stays super low (15-20%) and my highest temp measured is 63C. Not real sure what gives there, but am looking into it. And I guess if maybe you have any input in that department as well?

Not really sure about that, it might be that it's stressing a single core? Personally I'd use something else like AIDA64 or Prime95 to properly stress the cpu. But yeah, judging your temperatures you do have quite a bit of room for overclocking, you could potentially get 5ghz all core depending on how well binned the chip is, and of course if cooling allows. There are plenty of guides that walk you through overclocking, but also guides to specifically overclock the 8700K that you can look through to get a better understanding.