12600K to 14600K upgrade with DDR4

[Bobbysixjp]

I’m trying to get as much life as I can from my current motherboard and DDR4 RAM. How much longer will the 14600K give me over the 12600K? Maybe a year or two before I have to bite the bullet and upgrade my motherboard and switch to DDR5? Mainly used for gaming at high refresh 1440p/4K. 

[Eigenvektor]

7 minutes ago, Bobbysixjp said:

How much longer will the 14600K give me over the 12600K?

Hard to tell since there are no benchmarks yet. Wait for the CPU to come out and benchmarks to appear. But it's likely going to be a minor upgrade over a 13600K, maybe a few percent faster. Unless you're currently limited by CPU performance, it'll probably do little to nothing. In most cases the GPU is a more important factor for gaming. Having more threads might help in some games, others might not benefit at all.

[Bobbysixjp]

6 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Hard to tell since there are no benchmarks yet. Wait for the CPU to come out and benchmarks to appear. But it's likely going to be a minor upgrade over a 13600K, maybe a few percent faster. Unless you're currently limited by CPU performance, it'll probably do little to nothing. In most cases the GPU is a more important factor for gaming. Having more threads might help in some games, others might not benefit at all.

Thanks for the reply. In your opinion when will DDR4 become the limiting factor in a gaming rig?

[Eigenvektor]

8 minutes ago, Bobbysixjp said:

Thanks for the reply. In your opinion when will DDR4 become the limiting factor in a gaming rig?

From what I've seen so far, going with DDR5 can already provide a small performance uplift in some games. Though that doesn't mean you can't still get good enough performance with DDR4.

 

Personally I would worry about GPU first, CPU second and RAM last of all when it comes to upgrading my machine. I'll only upgrade the GPU if there's a meaningful performance uplift and the games I want to play are unplayable otherwise. I'll upgrade the CPU if it would be a limiting factor for the GPU. And RAM if it becomes a limiting factor for the CPU in turn.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

28 minutes ago, Bobbysixjp said:

Thanks for the reply. In your opinion when will DDR4 become the limiting factor in a gaming rig?

there is a benifit to ddr5 but nothing that overclocked ddr4 cant match

 

Just send a thaiphoon burner screenshot alongside your ram capacity and config (ex 2x16, 4x8) and ill see what its capable of

 

gear 1 can only do around 4000-4200 and gear 2 goes quite abit above that but limited to single rank for 5000+ so essentially pointless unless you are running the things at like 5400 or 5600 which would be insane for daily but doable on ics like 16gbit rev b or 8gbit djr, just that youll problably need to run the max voltage the ics scale up to (1.7v for rev b, 1.8-1.9v for djr) and youll definitely need a fan. Basically just stick to a dual/quad rank config and run at 4000-4200 gear 1 if you wanna preserve your sanity (ram ocs get painful when you start running properly high speeds)

[Brooksie359]

24 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

there is a benifit to ddr5 but nothing that overclocked ddr4 cant match

 

Just send a thaiphoon burner screenshot alongside your ram capacity and config (ex 2x16, 4x8) and ill see what its capable of

 

gear 1 can only do around 4000-4200 and gear 2 goes quite abit above that but limited to single rank for 5000+ so essentially pointless unless you are running the things at like 5400 or 5600 which would be insane for daily but doable on ics like 16gbit rev b or 8gbit djr, just that youll problably need to run the max voltage the ics scale up to (1.7v for rev b, 1.8-1.9v for djr) and youll definitely need a fan. Basically just stick to a dual/quad rank config and run at 4000-4200 gear 1 if you wanna preserve your sanity (ram ocs get painful when you start running properly high speeds)

I mean that's not really the case though. You can close the gap with overclocking DDR4 but even when looking at benchmarks with very high overclocked ram there is a difference between ddr4 and ddr5 unless you are running your ddr5 at a very low speed like base speed. Also cpu performance is pretty important too because the slower the cpu the less you will see the difference. I mean you see bigger uplifts in performance with 13th gen than you do 12th gen tbh. 

[Bobbysixjp]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

From what I've seen so far, going with DDR5 can already provide a small performance uplift in some games. Though that doesn't mean you can't still get good enough performance with DDR4.

 

Personally I would worry about GPU first, CPU second and RAM last of all when it comes to upgrading my machine. I'll only upgrade the GPU if there's a meaningful performance uplift and the games I want to play are unplayable otherwise. I'll upgrade the CPU if it would be a limiting factor for the GPU. And RAM if it becomes a limiting factor for the CPU in turn.

Will the 12600K with DDR4 limit my 4080? I mainly game at high refresh 1440p / 4K.

[Eigenvektor]

38 minutes ago, Bobbysixjp said:

Will the 12600K with DDR4 limit my 4080? I mainly game at high refresh 1440p / 4K.

Not sure I'll be able to give you a satisfactory answer here, since the answer varies game by game and I don't have access to comparable hardware to test.

 

Some games, such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield are quite CPU intensive. In this case a faster CPU may be able to give you a higher frame rate or at least a more consistent frame rate, if you are currently limited by CPU performance. Otherwise, there's going to be little to no effect on performance from a CPU upgrade. The same goes for games that require very little CPU performance, such as most multiplayer games.

 

There are tools like Afterburner or Intel Presentmon you can use to estimate if and how much GPU performance is limited by the CPU. As long as GPU usage is ≥90% a CPU upgrade generally won't do all that much.

 

And while Cyberpunk scales reasonably well with higher CPU core count, Starfield seems to mostly depend on single core performance. So for a game like Starfield it'll primarily come down to whether there's going to be a significant performance uplift per core upgrading to a 14600K.

 

The only general advice I can give is: Don't upgrade unless your system isn't able to do what you want/need it to do. If you're able to get playable frame rates by lowering quality and the quality is still acceptable to you, keep using it as long as possible. Only upgrade if performance and/or visuals are unacceptable without it. A great game doesn't need perfect visuals to be enjoyable and a bad game doesn't suddenly become better by photo realistic graphics.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

4 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

I mean that's not really the case though. You can close the gap with overclocking DDR4 but even when looking at benchmarks with very high overclocked ram there is a difference between ddr4 and ddr5 unless you are running your ddr5 at a very low speed like base speed. Also cpu performance is pretty important too because the slower the cpu the less you will see the difference. I mean you see bigger uplifts in performance with 13th gen than you do 12th gen tbh. 

Im comparing oced ddr4 to slow xmp ddr5 (<7200 ddr5) but manual oc 4000/4200 ddr4 and xmp 6000/6400 ddr5 are still pretty slow frequency wise so both should match or maybe proper oc ddr4 will fall abit behind ddr5. oc methodology being max freq gear 1 can run, loose primaries, tight secondary and tertiaries (trfc trrd tfaw etc. Excl tcwl), use as much vdimm as neccesary, imc volt at 1.45-1.5v

 

still not really noticable anyways, and tbh if i had money to waste sure id give ddr5 a go, maybe with a kit of hynix a dies and a 2dimmer like the dark or tachyon boards i can daily 8400-8800 ddr5, otherwise id rather go ddr4 if cost is a concern, and apparently intel ddr5 imc is a pain to get high freq ddr5 stable so id problably opt for amd here