Is buying future-proof CPU worth it?

[RazerRGBgamerPissBucket]

I'm sorry if I'm repeating some old question, I'm new to this forum and PC building in general, and I've been obsessed with chasing the most optimal bang for the buck.

 

As far as I understood from studying many benchmark tests, at least when it comes to gaming, GPU matters much more than the CPU. As in, you can run a new card with a much cheaper (older/less powerful) CPU with pretty small performance penalties, if any. For example, I found RTX 3060 would do pretty well paired with Ryzen 3500. To test CPU-GPU pairings, I used pc-builds.com's bottleneck calculator to make sure it wouldn't surpass 10%.

However, I've often heard it being advised to pick a more powerful CPU so in ~4 years you might upgrade to a more powerful GPU without having to buy new CPU/Motherboard. Essentially, you're paying forward for an upgrade. But is it worth it instead of selling old and buying new GPU+CPU+Motherboard?

I've thought of some pros and cons to buying an overpowered CPU:

 

PROs:                                                                                                                  Cons:

+ Beefier CPU is better for other productivity applications                                   - I mostly use my PC to game, so extra performance would just be left on the table

+ Don't have to deal with potential hardware market tribulations                         - Some new features like PCIe Gen5, etc. may be available, while you're stuck with

                                                                                                                            older stuff

 

Here I decided to make a thought experiment based on data that I can find online. Let's say in 2019 (4 yrs ago) I bought a budget mid-range card GTX 1660, and in 2023 I decided to sell it and buy RTX 3060, a card in roughly the same financial niche. Here are 2 hypothetical cases:

1) I bought Ryzen 3 1200 + M/brd. It was a reasonable CPU for the card at the time, but not very future-proof. I then sold CPU+M/brd along with the GPU and bought one better suited for RTX 3060, Ryzen 5 5500

2) I splurged on Ryzen 2600X + M/brd and kept them, just upgrading the GPU. According to pc-builds.com's bottleneck calculator, 26% of this CPU will not be utilized with GTX 1660, but when you upgrade to RTX 3060, it's just 2.6%.

 

Let's try to figure out the price (old prices researched by amazon listing charts from camelcamelcamel.com, current used prices are from ebay).

1) In 2019, Ryzen 3 1200 cost ~$100 retail, now it goes on ebay for about $45. New Ryzen 5 5500 costs ~$128. So buying one CPU, then selling and buying a new one costs $100 + $128 - $45 = $183

2) In early 2019, Ryzen 2600X cost ~$190 retail.

As for the motherboard, if my research is correct, B450M chipset would support Ryzen 1200, 2600X and 5500 all the same, and also that more advanced chipset would not improve performance all that much, so no point comparing the prices. This might be different if I was comparing thing in 2024 (5 years later), as things like PCIe Gen5 with DirectStorage would be an important feature for performance.

 

So, with both scenarios I ended up spending roughly the same amount of money ($7 is well within my margin of error). BUT! What about the inflation? It's been wild lately, so let's adjust $190@2019 for 2023: it's whopping $217! This might not be a representative case just like 2021 GPU price apocalypse is not representative of the GPU market, both are affected by a black swan event (COVID).

Basically, what I'm getting at is if you're just after gaming, it's probably not worth trying to anticipate a GPU upgrade and just go with whatever is the most optimal CPU for it right now. I'm still not sure of my math though, it's a very complicated topic for me.

[porina]

Maybe over thinking it a bit. I'd simplify it somewhat. What is a CPU that can meet your expected needs? Likewise for GPU. "bottlenecks" will swing depending on exactly how you use it too, so it isn't exact and IMO not worth over worrying about. Generally make sure the GPU is enough to drive your output expectations, and the CPU is fast enough to meet any high fps expectations.

 

Providing you don't go too low in spec, even if your system isn't cutting edge you can still have a great experience in games. I'd say a entry level for gaming today would be a 6 core Ryzen 3000 or Intel 8000 series CPU. Go 8 cores and you're likely fine for at least a couple years or more. Evaluate upgrading in the future when it is really needed. Don't plan for it today. 

[venomtail]

One thing that you're forgetting about is hassle. Sometimes it's worth more to pay a bit and leave the machine untouched for several years rather than have to change parts in and out every year or so. People like me don't mind but I know some who's world spins upside down if a folder shortcut disappears from their desktop...

[Arika]

No such thing as future proof

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

I've taken the mid range CPUs the previous two times I bought a computer, in both instances I did about 7 years with that system. My thinkpad with a mid range CPU held up for 9 - 10 years to do laptop things.

 

I'd pay more attention to getting at least 32GB, and preferably 64GB, of RAM in my system and somewhat future proofing the motherboard in terms of connectivity features (USB3, plenty of USB-C ports, 2.5 Gbps NIC or better, ...) A mid to upper range GPU from now should also last you 6 to 7 years if you care less about graphics candy and avoid 4k at 120 Hz refresh rates. You can always toss in an eBay-sourced top-end CPU that fits in the same socket five years from now if you need a cheap and quick upgrade.

[Ripred]

Future proof is a dirty word on this forum...

Yea this method is what I usually try to do, making sure there plenty of headroom for future upgrades, Especially take that into account when choosing a power supply as that's the one component you'll likely be moving between new builds for years, as far as CPU my approach isnt necessarily get the biggest CPU you can, I usually focus on the motherboard, I don't always buy the top flagship unless there's a cool sale but i will buy a mid-high tier mobo that can handle the top flagship CPU's easily with VRM headroom to spare plus more features than I need, for one I take this approach because I can get away with a mid tier CPU for now and know without question the mobo will handle the top flagship CPU for later upgrades, reason two is if the newer generation of CPU is compatible with your socket, having a mid high end board means you have the best chance of bios support for the new chips and their new features, what I'm getting at is I build within the same vein of what your asking but instead of putting the money towards the CPU ill put it towards the mobo. but following this method can be tricky because you don't want to follow this path if you want to build on a certain platform and that platform is end of life, this isnt advisable, first I would check to see if the platform is promised to be supported for a couple years past time of build planning, example is AMD AM4 is end of life so if you were to build within this id say choose the flagship CPU that best suits your needs then choose the best priced motherboard that's capable of maxing that chip

[RazerRGBgamerPissBucket]

14 minutes ago, Ripred said:

Future proof is a dirty word on this forum...

Yea this method is what I usually try to do, making sure there plenty of headroom for future upgrades, Especially take that into account when choosing a power supply as that's the one component you'll likely be moving between new builds for years, as far as CPU my approach isnt necessarily get the biggest CPU you can, I usually focus on the motherboard, I don't always buy the top flagship unless there's a cool sale but i will buy a mid-high tier mobo that can handle the top flagship CPU's easily with VRM headroom to spare plus more features than I need, for one I take this approach because I can get away with a mid tier CPU for now and know without question the mobo will handle the top flagship CPU for later upgrades, reason two is if the newer generation of CPU is compatible with your socket, having a mid high end board means you have the best chance of bios support for the new chips and their new features, what I'm getting at is I build within the same vein of what your asking but instead of putting the money towards the CPU ill put it towards the mobo. but following this method can be tricky because you don't want to follow this path if you want to build on a certain platform and that platform is end of life, this isnt advisable, first I would check to see if the platform is promised to be supported for a couple years past time of build planning, example is AMD AM4 is end of life so if you were to build within this id say choose the flagship CPU that best suits your needs then choose the best priced motherboard that's capable of maxing that chip

Yeah I forgot you don't have to upgrade mombrd along with the CPU. My worry with that is that you're committing yourself to a set of standards that might leave you behind later on. I focused on PCIe Gen5 because I believe DirectStorage is gonna be and important performance factor in the coming years. But at the end of the day, you can resell almost anything, so if you really wanted to, you could switch horses for a moderate fee, if you decided that it was worth it.

[191x7]

Online bottleneck calculators are made by people who do not understand how bottlenecks work.

Made purely to get money from advertisements and people who browse the page. Clickbait.

Worse than useless because it's better not having information than working with false information.

 

A CPU prepares frames for the GPU to render. It does object placements, physics and general pre-render.

The GPU takes what the CPU prerendered and does the details, shading, textures, particles, "triangles", ...

Changing the resolution does not affect the CPU a lot. But it affects the GPU a lot since it changes the number of details.

 

If a CPU can prepare 60 frames...

1. and the GPU can render 100 frames on 1080p, the GPU will be used 60% meaning a 40% bottleneck. A stronger CPU would be needed.

2. and the GPU can render 60 frames on 1440p, there won't be a noticeable bottleneck and the CPU&GPU are evenly matched. A stronger GPU would be bottlenecked.

3. and the GPU can render 30 frames on 4K, there won't be a bottleneck. And the CPU could power a stronger GPU.

 

 

[RazerRGBgamerPissBucket]

7 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Online bottleneck calculators are made by people who do not understand how bottlenecks work.

Made purely to get money from advertisements and people who browse the page. Clickbait.

Worse than useless because it's better not having information than working with false information.

 

A CPU prepares frames for the GPU to render. It does object placements, physics and general pre-render.

The GPU takes what the CPU prerendered and does the details, shading, textures, particles, "triangles", ...

Changing the resolution does not affect the CPU a lot. But it affects the GPU a lot since it changes the number of details.

 

If a CPU can prepare 60 frames...

1. and the GPU can render 100 frames on 1080p, the GPU will be used 60% meaning a 40% bottleneck. A stronger CPU would be needed.

2. and the GPU can render 60 frames on 1440p, there won't be a noticeable bottleneck and the CPU&GPU are evenly matched. A stronger GPU would be bottlenecked.

3. and the GPU can render 30 frames on 4K, there won't be a bottleneck. And the CPU could power a stronger GPU.

 

 

I think I have confused some word. When I wrote about "bottlenecks" earlier I meant that certain % of CPU goes unitilized, so it's probably better to call it "overhead". I don't know why you'd doubt the pcbuilds' bottleneck calculator, since what it does is exactly what you said, load GPU 100% and see how much CPU is left unitilized. 

[191x7]

34 minutes ago, RazerRGBgamerPissBucket said:

I think I have confused some word. When I wrote about "bottlenecks" earlier I meant that certain % of CPU goes unitilized, so it's probably better to call it "overhead". I don't know why you'd doubt the pcbuilds' bottleneck calculator, since what it does is exactly what you said, load GPU 100% and see how much CPU is left unitilized. 

Well, you might learn from here...

 

[Holmes108]

23 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Well, you might learn from here...

 

I think the question is more about why the particular site OP used is considered useless. They claim to have the type of information you suggest (taking not only the specific CPU and GPU into account, but also resolution). Have there been obvious examples where they're egregiously wrong? Is it just that there's no way they could have accurate info about that many combos of CPU/GPU? 

 

I've been curious about the usefulness of that site myself, because it seems like it would be super useful info, even if it's not 100% accurate, but at least in the ballpark, when browsing for a CPU/GPU combo.

[191x7]

3 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

I think the question is more about why the particular site OP used is considered useless. They claim to have the type of information you suggest (taking not only the specific CPU and GPU into account, but also resolution). Have there been obvious examples where they're egregiously wrong? Is it just that there's no way they could have accurate info about that many combos of CPU/GPU? 

 

I've been curious about the usefulness of that site myself, because it seems like it would be super useful info, even if it's not 100% accurate, but at least in the ballpark, when browsing for a CPU/GPU combo.

 

Well, they take the under-utilization of a CPU as a sign of bottleneck. And that's completely wrong. 

We don't have games that perfectly scale with a number of cores, different architectures, schedulers, OS-es and drivers.

Having a high end CPU and a low end GPU does not mean the CPU is bottlenecked. It just means a stronger GPU could be used if there is a need to. There's no penalty.

On the other hand, if your GPU is bottlenecked, you have several penalties - frame drops, frametime spikes, GPU clocks fluctuating (switching between low power or high power states), stutters when someone shoots at you in a game (the worst situation, exactly when you need to reeact the fastest). And so on.

[2dfx]

Honestly, the delta between new CPU generations these days is so small, you can invest in a decent platform and it should let you survive 3 or more GPU generations.  As time goes on, RAM also drops in price so if you ever need more than 16 or 32GB in future, it will be more cost effective to keep pace.  CPU's ultimately do the same thing.

 

Too often we buy into the hype of new CPU's and mainboards rather than just upgrading what we have.  I have a Ryzen 5 3600 with a 3090 that I've been running for a year and a half.  I could feasibly upgrade to a 5800X3D or a 5950 later down the line if I really needed a performance bump.  And in the coming years it will be cheaper to do so.

[TacoSenpai]

I'm going to be honest with you I built my first Ryzen rig with a 1800X and carried over my 1080 from my rig previous to it when it first came out.  Good machine but did I need it even in my rare video editing uses?  Not really.  That machine lasted me a good 6-7 years before my mainboard went bad and I retired it and built my current rig with a 5600X and 3070 and it by far blows my first ryzen rig out of the water...I'm sure when I build a new one down the line the case will be the same. I mostly still play Halo MCC, Doom, and now Hogwarts Legacy with some minimal Oracle VM box use for learning Linux and experimentation.  Could I have gone with a ryzen 7 and out of sheer impulse want something beefier?  Sure at times.  Does it really matter at the end if my machine does what it needs to do?  Not really.

 

Bottom Line:

Gauge out your budget and needs and build accordingly.  No such thing as future proof.

[freeagent]

I bought a 5900X to be future proof.

 

Its not future proof

[RazerRGBgamerPissBucket]

6 hours ago, 2dfx said:

Honestly, the delta between new CPU generations these days is so small, you can invest in a decent platform and it should let you survive 3 or more GPU generations.  As time goes on, RAM also drops in price so if you ever need more than 16 or 32GB in future, it will be more cost effective to keep pace.  CPU's ultimately do the same thing.

 

Too often we buy into the hype of new CPU's and mainboards rather than just upgrading what we have.  I have a Ryzen 5 3600 with a 3090 that I've been running for a year and a half.  I could feasibly upgrade to a 5800X3D or a 5950 later down the line if I really needed a performance bump.  And in the coming years it will be cheaper to do so.

I also thought about keeping the same motherboard, but it is somewhat situational. A few years ago it was a no-brainer to have something like Ryzen 2300X with the fanciest chipset and then upgrade to 5600 for example.

However, the from 7th generation on it's a whole new socket, so best I'm getting out of AM4 is sticking in a Ryzen 5900X, which seemingly does not square up well to RTX 4000 series so far. Maybe later on more budget friendly cards are gonna be less CPU-chokey.

Also, older AM4 boards had PCIe 3.0 and not 4.0. I keep fixating on it because I thing SSD-to-GPU direct storage is gonna be a big deal and going to directly effect fps. I know it's a minor factor and things like this a rare, just me over-obsessing about unknown quantities.

[Beerzerker]

20 hours ago, RazerRGBgamerPissBucket said:

I also thought about keeping the same motherboard, but it is somewhat situational. A few years ago it was a no-brainer to have something like Ryzen 2300X with the fanciest chipset and then upgrade to 5600 for example.

However, the from 7th generation on it's a whole new socket, so best I'm getting out of AM4 is sticking in a Ryzen 5900X, which seemingly does not square up well to RTX 4000 series so far. Maybe later on more budget friendly cards are gonna be less CPU-chokey.

Also, older AM4 boards had PCIe 3.0 and not 4.0. I keep fixating on it because I thing SSD-to-GPU direct storage is gonna be a big deal and going to directly effect fps. I know it's a minor factor and things like this a rare, just me over-obsessing about unknown quantities.

I've noted over time you can overspec a system and it does well for a few years but then time starts to catch up with it so the term "Futureproof" is indeed a dirty word here.
However I've also found out it's not a matter of the CPU alone - It's basically everything and what you will be using it for.

And example I can give is not too long ago (Late last year) I had popped one of my Socket 939 setups (X2 4800+/Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe/OCZ Platinum RAM-4x1GB) the case here just to see how well it would do with today's web browsing and whatnot.
I was wondering what if I had never bothered to upgrade things since I had built it - "What would I have on my hands as of now" was the choo-choo of thought about it.

It did suprisingly well!
Pages would load quickly enough (About a sec, maybe a tad longer) and the performance with multimedia with vids on YouTube was acceptable - Vids were kinda slow to load/buffer but they did and played fine once done.

The biggest, single detriment was my limited amount of RAM, not the performance of the CPU or anything else being at fault.

I had all 4 slots populated with 1GB sticks of DDR and the only way to do any better is to find 2GB sticks of it, but since it's not a priority for me I'm not going out of my way to really look for it if I don't already have it. The lack of RAM resources itself was the real performance killer in what it lacked.
The X2 4800+ did well, ran cool and seemed content to do "Whatever" along with the board, the GPU was kinda "Meh" about it but played along anyway.

The lesson I learned is a simple one - If doing a long term build, don't spec it by todays standard's since what's considered enough today will certainly not be enough for tomorrow.
That's why I have 32GB's of DDR4 onhand now instead of what's called enough these days (16GB's) and I'm actually considering increasing it's capacity to at least 64GB's before it's over with - May even shoot for 128GB "Just because".