Opinions on 3rd and 4th gen Intel

[Demonic Donut]

I'm going to be putting an old system back in service soon as a gaming computer for my older daughter.

 

For PC, her primary games she plays right now are Minecraft and Untitled Goose Game. She likes to play the Sims with her mom as well, but it's not quite her speed yet when she's solo. I'm sure we'll find more games as time goes on, I haven't spent much time looking for good games on PC for her as she plays our Switch more for her screen time.

 

Anyway...

 

I've got two motherboards and CPU's, but am probably going to throw a different CPU into either one.

 

First board is a MSI Z77A-G43. It currently has an i5 3570 (non K) in it.

 

The other is a MSI B85-G41. It has an i5 4460 (non K) in it.

 

I've got a fair amount of 1600 ddr3 for them, a power supply and 660ti.

 

I know that neither board is anything special, and the Z77A isn't a great overclocker. But both the 3770K and 4790K are around $100-$120 and I feel like they would be a decent upgrade over the CPUs I have now. I think that hyperthreading and the higher core clocks would help. I remember being CPU bottlenecked at times when I was using them regularly.

 

The 4790k seems to score roughly 5%-10% higher, but if I got lucky I could OC and get close to equal performance for $20 less.

 

Any thoughts, ideas or opinions from those better versed in this era?

 

I'm not looking to buy a new mobo/CPU. I don't want a new GPU currently either. And if the consensus is that a new CPU won't help much, I'll just save the money and put it towards buying a new case, speakers, mouse and keyboard etc.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

4 minutes ago, Demonic Donut said:

I'm going to be putting an old system back in service soon as a gaming computer for my older daughter.

 

For PC, her primary games she plays right now are Minecraft and Untitled Goose Game. She likes to play the Sims with her mom as well, but it's not quite her speed yet when she's solo. I'm sure we'll find more games as time goes on, I haven't spent much time looking for good games on PC for her as she plays our Switch more for her screen time.

 

Anyway...

 

I've got two motherboards and CPU's, but am probably going to throw a different CPU into either one.

 

First board is a MSI Z77A-G43. It currently has an i5 3570 (non K) in it.

 

The other is a MSI B85-G41. It has an i5 4460 (non K) in it.

 

I've got a fair amount of 1600 ddr3 for them, a power supply and 660ti.

 

I know that neither board is anything special, and the Z77A isn't a great overclocker. But both the 3770K and 4790K are around $100-$120 and I feel like they would be a decent upgrade over the CPUs I have now. I think that hyperthreading and the higher core clocks would help. I remember being CPU bottlenecked at times when I was using them regularly.

 

The 4790k seems to score roughly 5%-10% higher, but if I got lucky I could OC and get close to equal performance for $20 less.

 

Any thoughts, ideas or opinions from those better versed in this era?

 

I'm not looking to buy a new mobo/CPU. I don't want a new GPU currently either. And if the consensus is that a new CPU won't help much, I'll just save the money and put it towards buying a new case, speakers, mouse and keyboard etc.

Intel 4th gen is definitely much better if the price between 3rd and 4th gen is the same, it has a newer architecture and more modern instruction sets. According to Gamers Nexus, it overclocks pretty well too and is pretty much the oldest you should go in terms of architecture. 

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

1 minute ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

Intel 4th gen is definitely much better if the price between 3rd and 4th gen is the same, it has a newer architecture and more modern instruction sets. According to Gamers Nexus, it overclocks pretty well too and is pretty much the oldest you should go in terms of architecture. 

not to mention the motherboards would be newer too, ie, better capacitors and better chipset

[Needfuldoer]

Give the CPUs you already have a try first. None of those titles are very demanding (unless Minecraft is loaded with mods), and I doubt Haswell CPUs have hit the bottom of their depreciation curve yet so upgrading later will probably be even cheaper.

[Cereal5]

I have a 3570K in a spare system, overclocked to 4.5Ghz, and it plays much better than I expected. I can't say I play any of the titles you mentioned, but I have no reason to believe either of the combos mentioned wouldn't be playable on. You can also always look at a non-K variant if you do choose to upgrade. It would save you a couple dollars, but still get you a very tangible performance upgrade, basically on par with the unlocked variety.

[-rascal-]

2 minutes ago, Demonic Donut said:

I'm going to be putting an old system back in service soon as a gaming computer for my older daughter.

 

For PC, her primary games she plays right now are Minecraft and Untitled Goose Game. She likes to play the Sims with her mom as well, but it's not quite her speed yet when she's solo. I'm sure we'll find more games as time goes on, I haven't spent much time looking for good games on PC for her as she plays our Switch more for her screen time.

 

Anyway...

 

I've got two motherboards and CPU's, but am probably going to throw a different CPU into either one.

 

First board is a MSI Z77A-G43. It currently has an i5 3570 (non K) in it.

 

The other is a MSI B85-G41. It has an i5 4460 (non K) in it.

 

I've got a fair amount of 1600 ddr3 for them, a power supply and 660ti.

 

I know that neither board is anything special, and the Z77A isn't a great overclocker. But both the 3770K and 4790K are around $100-$120 and I feel like they would be a decent upgrade over the CPUs I have now. I think that hyperthreading and the higher core clocks would help. I remember being CPU bottlenecked at times when I was using them regularly.

 

The 4790k seems to score roughly 5%-10% higher, but if I got lucky I could OC and get close to equal performance for $20 less.

 

Any thoughts, ideas or opinions from those better versed in this era?

 

I'm not looking to buy a new mobo/CPU. I don't want a new GPU currently either. And if the consensus is that a new CPU won't help much, I'll just save the money and put it towards buying a new case, speakers, mouse and keyboard etc.

 

Keep in mind, Z77 does not support 4th Gen; only 2nd and 3rd Gen Intel.

 

If you can get a 3rd or 4th Gen i7, that would be the most ideal.

Either K or non-K should be fine

• i7-3770(K)
• i7-4770(K)
• i7-4790(K)

Yes, the extra threads found in the i7 will be helpful.

 

From experience, yes 4th Gen actually overclocks quite well.

The i5-4690K I had problem running 4.8 GHz -- that said, it was paired with a ASUS Z97 Maximus VII Hero board, and a 280mm AIO.

 

 

[Raintech]

I gamed on an i7 3770k until middle of last year; And as an accomplished PC builder, I watched the market for all 8 years and never felt the need for an upgrade; And followed all the new processors in that entire timespan, I feel like I am more qualified to chime in here than almost anyone else. As someone who lived with, and gamed with the i7 3770k almost daily for 8 years, I can tell you first hand exactly what to expect from these generation of parts. Even in the past half year after upgrading to an 11th gen i5, I have not felt much of an increased performance from my CPU.

If you're planning to allocate any amount of budget in upgrading the planned rigs, you're best off following the number 1 rule of building a gaming rig; Allocate the biggest budget to your graphics card. I would say that holds more true in your case than anything else combined.

In my 8 years experience of running the i7 3770k fropm 2013 until 2021, majority of that time of which it was paired with a GTX680 : I can tell you the 3rd gen processor felt plenty powerful, and I played minecraft extensively throughout several of those years so I can speak first hand for that title. It was the GTX680 that was screaming and dying in newer games; as soon as I upgraded to my GTX1080, the old i7 3770k kept trucking along just fine, and honestly still would to this day if I didn't upgrade still. I did not feel like any game would have benefitted all that greatly from the added CPU processing power. Hyperthreading is nice, but honestly it tends to be only a fairly minor upgrade in performance, even in games like minecraft. Minecraft is considered quite CPU dependant and benefits from more cores/hyperthreading, but even then you're not going to see double the framerate from having an i7 over an i5. Maybe in the moderate 10% fps increase. Plus I'm assuming you're not going to be giving her any crazy high refresh rate monitor anyway, so she'll be running between 30~60 fps which is extremely easy for even this generation of processors to push, and assuming you'll be giving her a cheapish 60htz display anyway, there's no reason to aim for higher unles she's got aspirations to be a competitive FPS player or something where input lag matters to her (which is the main benefit of a higher fps above the display's refresh rate)

 

For this generation of CPU's especially, it's well documented by now that the RAM, and Motherboard have minimal effect on gaming FPS, only on overclocking performance. And even though these chips do overclock well, it's actually not necessary to flog these older chips unless you're an enthusiast and enjoy overclocking; It's too much hassle, and risk of instability in a family member's rig just causes more headaches incase of bluescreens and crashes in the longrun. I would not bother doing anything but the mildest overclocks on these chips, and mild overclocks give almost negligible FPS improvements, especially again, as your main bottleneck is going to the GPU based, not CPU based. And even if you did overclock, the extra money spent on K-series CPU, beefy cooloers and fans, better PSU's and better motherboard chipsets; At the end of the day the parts needed to overclock reliably honestly detracted from any cost-efficiency claims that overclocking could have held. Again, not worth the effort of overclocking, especially on a rig where if something goes wrong your daughter has to come whining to you.

That 660ti is the ONLY part you should be considering replacing. Until you replace that gpu, don't even think about spending even a dime on anything else.

So unless your daughter is a snob who requires 200+ FPS to play and have fun, she'll be fine running vanilla or light minecraft modpacks with the current processors you described. From memory, my i7 3770k and GTX1080 combo was pulling around 90~100 FPS with moderate settings in vanilla minecraft, in closed spaces, with rare dips to 30 fps during explosions. Your daughter's currrent rig should be within ~20% of my old rig. The GTX660ti is by far the weakest link here, and evidence of this will stick out like a sore thumb once she pushes this kind of rig with even a moderately graphic-intense game. In fact, I would wager even the newest Sims games will display some signs of this.

I would say use whatever board and cpu you currently own, and let your daughter grow into some more graphically intense games, and when she does, keep that fund ready for a GPU upgrade. 

So even though this is a gross oversimplification; I would say the 3rd gen i5 is fine to handle anything up to a GTX 970, or GTX 1060. Only once you find yourself with a GPU of that spec or better, should you look into a CPU upgrade. If my 3770k felt like a good compliment to, or at least, only a smallish bottleneck to a GTX 1080, the i5 could probably pull adequate gaming FPS with at least a GPU of this spec range. Obviously it'll depend on alot of other factors and the exact title, but this should be your rough average with any new title your daughter may play.
 

[ApolloX75]

Both my daughters use 4th gen i5's. One is a 4690k and the other is a 4460, both are on little barebone H81 boards that I had lying around leftover from upgrades. Each has 16GB RAM, a SATA SSD and one has a GTX 970; the other a GTX 670. Both play Minecraft, Warframe, Yooka-Laylee, Spyro etc etc with no issues at 1080p. They're more than powerful enough for their needs.

 

If I get some new parts to throw in, I'll always happily upgrade their systems in a heartbeat but as it stands they haven't the need for anything more powerful than a little quad core i5. Plenty of life left in that platform if you ask me.

[Demonic Donut]

1 hour ago, Raintech said:

I gamed on an i7 3770k until middle of last year; And as an accomplished PC builder, I watched the market for all 8 years and never felt the need for an upgrade; And followed all the new processors in that entire timespan, I feel like I am more qualified to chime in here than almost anyone else. As someone who lived with, and gamed with the i7 3770k almost daily for 8 years, I can tell you first hand exactly what to expect from these generation of parts. Even in the past half year after upgrading to an 11th gen i5, I have not felt much of an increased performance from my CPU.

If you're planning to allocate any amount of budget in upgrading the planned rigs, you're best off following the number 1 rule of building a gaming rig; Allocate the biggest budget to your graphics card. I would say that holds more true in your case than anything else combined.

In my 8 years experience of running the i7 3770k fropm 2013 until 2021, majority of that time of which it was paired with a GTX680 : I can tell you the 3rd gen processor felt plenty powerful, and I played minecraft extensively throughout several of those years so I can speak first hand for that title. It was the GTX680 that was screaming and dying in newer games; as soon as I upgraded to my GTX1080, the old i7 3770k kept trucking along just fine, and honestly still would to this day if I didn't upgrade still. I did not feel like any game would have benefitted all that greatly from the added CPU processing power. Hyperthreading is nice, but honestly it tends to be only a fairly minor upgrade in performance, even in games like minecraft. Minecraft is considered quite CPU dependant and benefits from more cores/hyperthreading, but even then you're not going to see double the framerate from having an i7 over an i5. Maybe in the moderate 10% fps increase. Plus I'm assuming you're not going to be giving her any crazy high refresh rate monitor anyway, so she'll be running between 30~60 fps which is extremely easy for even this generation of processors to push, and assuming you'll be giving her a cheapish 60htz display anyway, there's no reason to aim for higher unles she's got aspirations to be a competitive FPS player or something where input lag matters to her (which is the main benefit of a higher fps above the display's refresh rate)

 

For this generation of CPU's especially, it's well documented by now that the RAM, and Motherboard have minimal effect on gaming FPS, only on overclocking performance. And even though these chips do overclock well, it's actually not necessary to flog these older chips unless you're an enthusiast and enjoy overclocking; It's too much hassle, and risk of instability in a family member's rig just causes more headaches incase of bluescreens and crashes in the longrun. I would not bother doing anything but the mildest overclocks on these chips, and mild overclocks give almost negligible FPS improvements, especially again, as your main bottleneck is going to the GPU based, not CPU based. And even if you did overclock, the extra money spent on K-series CPU, beefy cooloers and fans, better PSU's and better motherboard chipsets; At the end of the day the parts needed to overclock reliably honestly detracted from any cost-efficiency claims that overclocking could have held. Again, not worth the effort of overclocking, especially on a rig where if something goes wrong your daughter has to come whining to you.

That 660ti is the ONLY part you should be considering replacing. Until you replace that gpu, don't even think about spending even a dime on anything else.

So unless your daughter is a snob who requires 200+ FPS to play and have fun, she'll be fine running vanilla or light minecraft modpacks with the current processors you described. From memory, my i7 3770k and GTX1080 combo was pulling around 90~100 FPS with moderate settings in vanilla minecraft, in closed spaces, with rare dips to 30 fps during explosions. Your daughter's currrent rig should be within ~20% of my old rig. The GTX660ti is by far the weakest link here, and evidence of this will stick out like a sore thumb once she pushes this kind of rig with even a moderately graphic-intense game. In fact, I would wager even the newest Sims games will display some signs of this.

I would say use whatever board and cpu you currently own, and let your daughter grow into some more graphically intense games, and when she does, keep that fund ready for a GPU upgrade. 

So even though this is a gross oversimplification; I would say the 3rd gen i5 is fine to handle anything up to a GTX 970, or GTX 1060. Only once you find yourself with a GPU of that spec or better, should you look into a CPU upgrade. If my 3770k felt like a good compliment to, or at least, only a smallish bottleneck to a GTX 1080, the i5 could probably pull adequate gaming FPS with at least a GPU of this spec range. Obviously it'll depend on alot of other factors and the exact title, but this should be your rough average with any new title your daughter may play.
 

 

59 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

Both my daughters use 4th gen i5's. One is a 4690k and the other is a 4460, both are on little barebone H81 boards that I had lying around leftover from upgrades. Each has 16GB RAM, a SATA SSD and one has a GTX 970; the other a GTX 670. Both play Minecraft, Warframe, Yooka-Laylee, Spyro etc etc with no issues at 1080p. They're more than powerful enough for their needs.

 

If I get some new parts to throw in, I'll always happily upgrade their systems in a heartbeat but as it stands they haven't the need for anything more powerful than a little quad core i5. Plenty of life left in that platform if you ask me.

This is what I was worried about when I was debating upgrading. With current GPU prices I'm having a hard time justifying the price anyway.

 

I'll just go with a nice case and peripherals. Maybe some RGB as she loves her mom's RGB shinies.

 

Thanks all.