Upgrading from 12th gen i5

[1sascha]

I'm currently on a 12600K with an RTX 4070, MSI Z690 Tomahawk motherboard and 2x16 GB of G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3600 CL16. Since 14th gen seems like a bit of a pointless "upgrade" over 13th, I'd be happy to go with 13 - and I'll probably also go KF instead of K if price differences stay the way they are now. I don't think I've ever used the IGPU of my 12600K, so unless we're talking emergency situations, I don't really need it.

 

Question is: 13/14600 K(F) or 13/14700 K(F)?

 

I'm using a 240mm Lian Li AiO and since I moved on to a case with much better airflow (Fractal Pop Air XL), that thing does an excellent job of keeping the 12600K cool. According to GN's AiO round-up, that cooler is up there in performance with larger ones (on max fan RPM, admittedly) but I'm pretty sure it would be enough for the 13 or 14600K(F). Question is: Would it also suffice for the 13/14700K?

 

Also: Would it even make sense to go i7 instead of i5 with the RTX 4070? I'm pretty sure I'm CPU-bound in some games with the 12600K, and 13th gen seems to give a nice overall uplift even if I "only" choose the i5. According to Passmark for example, the 12600K is ~27 % slower than the 13600K. So would the i7 be overkill in this config?

 

This is the fourth GPU I've had in this PC since I built it early last year, so I don't plan on yet another GPU-upgrade in the near future. Besides: the 4070 Ti is too expensive for my taste, anyway at €800+ and I won't be spending that kind of money on a graphics-card, no matter what.

 

Another reason for the upgrade is that I'm running some games that do benefit from improved single-thread performance - and since we're talking flight-sims in VR here, every bit of performance boost really helps..

But I would like to avoid the extra cost of having to buy another, larger AiO... especially since the one I have is not even two years old and works fine.

 

PSU isn't a problem BTW, since I upgraded to a 750W bequiet! Straight Power 12 to get more wattage and ATX 3.0 compatibility for that 4070.

 

 

S.

[MiszS]

i don't think that upgrading your pc right now is worth it at all, you have basically a great last gen cpu (14th gen doesn't count, its too bad), so i would rather save up the money for a better pc in the future. But if you want for whatever reason to upgrade, the cooler will be perfectly fine imo, unless you are doing rendering, and the cpu is on 100% for a long time, it should be perfectly fine.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

12600k is still pretty good, any cpu bottlenecking issues just overclock the thing

 

Ram oc may help abit aswell esp if those rams happen to be 16-16-16 bdie bin and not the fakey 16-19-19 or whatever other variant

[--SID--]

18 minutes ago, 1sascha said:

According to Passmark for example, the 12600K is ~27 % slower than the 13600K.

Single core or multi core? You have to look at single core. 12600K, 13600K and 14600K are built on the same core. The only difference is the core speed (and the amount of e-cores but that doesn't matter much for gaming)

 

What's the resolution of your monitor?

[1sascha]

36 minutes ago, --SID-- said:

Single core or multi core?

Should've clarified that, yes. That's overall performance. Single core isn't as impressive of a difference, but 13th gen is faster there too. Difference is well under 10% though. For added single thread performance, I'd need the i7, I suppose - hence my question about a 240mm AiO on a 13/14700 K(F).

 

36 minutes ago, --SID-- said:

What's the resolution of your monitor?

1440p - but in VR, that hardly matters, since the Reverb G2 I use has a much higher resolution than 1440p.

 

37 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

if those rams happen to be 16-16-16 bdie bin and not the fakey 16-19-19

They're the "fakey" variant. 16-19-19-39. Still: I was on 2x8, then 2x2x8 GB Corsair Vengeance 3600 CL18 before and the G-Skill kit is quite a bit faster than those. At least that's what all the benchmarks I've ran seem to think..

 

Main reason for switching was some weird behavior from the PC in the last 5 or 6 weeks though (crashes/BSoDs) and I was suspecting that the RAM was either bad, the kits didn't work with each other ("identical" kits, but I bought them separately and they did have DRAMs from different manufacturers) or that having all four slots populated made things unstable. Or a combination of that.

The Corsair ones also weren't on MSI's compatibility-list (the G-Skill one is), but that doesn't have to mean much, I suppose.

 

PC's been running stable now for 10 days, so I'm hoping it really was the RAM. Too lazy to plug the old sticks back in and memtest86 them..

 

 

 

S.

 

[--SID--]

13 minutes ago, 1sascha said:

1440p - but in VR, that hardly matters, since the Reverb G2 I use has a much higher resolution than 1440p.

Upgrading the GPU matters more at higher resolutions. With a 4090 the difference between a 14600K and a 12600K is only 12% at 1440p and 4% at 4K. With your 4070 those differences are much lower because the 4070 is 33% slower than a 4090.

 

What you have to do is to check ingame the CPU usage per core with MSI Afterburner. What I think is that there is a GPU bottlekneck.

[1sascha]

Well... the difference in power-draw and heat is quite... scary, shall we say? And I don't know why ...

 

 

i7 14700 KF @ stock speeds. I let Cinebench run until more than one core started to show 100°C and then aborted. Took about 3 or 4 minutes, I think.

No OCing whatsoever, other than having XMP enabled.

 

This is with a 240mm AiO, 2x140mm exhausts at the top, 120mm exhaust at the rear and I even dug out one of the RGB-fans that came with the case and mounted it in the front as an additional intake for the case/GPU. Sits in line with the two radiator fans, blowing air in through the front panel.

 

What I don't quite get is the high power draw... 300 Watt max according to HWMonitor, when max power-draw in boost-mode is supposed to be "only" 253 Watts.

Plus the CPU never even reached its supposed max turbo frequency - I cut off the pic, but max recorded frequency on all of the P-cores was 5.5 GHz.

 

No idea what's going on here - I did have a simple OC on the 12600K, but the BIOS did reset to "safe" defaults after the swap (as it should) and everything in the OC-section was on default/Auto.

 

Would really love to understand what's happening here. I do know from reviews/tests that this AiO (Lian Li Galahad 240) can handle 250 Watt and the case has pretty great airflow (Fractal Pop Air XL RGB), that's why I didn't worry about getting the i7 ... but 300W is probably a bit much for any 240mm AiO... that's getting into i9-territory.

 

 

 

 

 

S.

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

look if you have the cash and need to dopamine rush... upgrade away~ 

otherwise no that isnt a worthwhile upgrade at all at this time, it pretty much makes zero sense, can't recommend therefore. 

[1sascha]

13 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

otherwise no that isnt a worthwhile upgrade at all at this time, it pretty much makes zero sense, can't recommend therefore. 

Too late... already upgraded.

 

I do have a legit reason besides d!ck measuring ... the one game I play quite a lot is heavily dependent on single-thread performance - which I hope the i7 will improve. Can't find out yet because the cable for my VR-set seems to have croaked and I'm waiting for a replacement...

 

However:

 

 

S.