I5 8400 to 8600k

[Akatsuki198]

So I was looking into my system and learned that my 1080 is bottlenecked by my 8400, i wanna save money and I was wondering if it'd be worth switching to an 8600k and overclocking it to about 4.9-5ghz so I can just pop in another cpu or if I should just save up and go for a new mobo and a 11600k

System Specs

I5 8400

Gigabyte Aorus z370 Gaming 7

Corsair 120mm aio

Corsair Vengeance 4x8gb 3200mhz

EVGA 1080 SC Black

1tb 980 pro (ik it's overkill for my gen mobo but it was on sale lol)

Thermaltake 750w psu

[starsmine]

your 1080 is not being significantly bottlenecked by an 8400. 

And I would sooner get a new GPU before spending money on a dead and not much faster rocket lake platform. 

You will need a new platform eventually, but if you are coming from an 8000 series, just go for raptor lake or am5, or if you want to wait, arrow lake late next year on intels next platform.

[Akatsuki198]

2 minutes ago, starsmine said:

your 1080 is not being significantly bottlenecked by an 8400. 

Not significant no you are right, I was just wondering if I could squeeze some more performance out of my platform before I go to a whole new setup with a better graphics card, if it's still not worth it then I'll ride it out, main reason is I have the opportunity to get an 8600k for 100 bucks

[Crunchy Dragon]

How do you know your 1080 is being bottlenecked?

[Akatsuki198]

Just now, Crunchy Dragon said:

How do you know your 1080 is being bottlenecked?

From a calculator and also looking into just similar setups to see the performance vs other cpus

[Neutraliz]

8400 vs. 8600k would be a simple frequency bump, that's it. Not worth it at all and will not have a significant impact. 

Even if you are so called "bottlenecked", it's not worth it, both ways. 
Your CPU is gonna hold back a potential GPU upgrade.
Your GPU isn't gonna perform much better with a faster CPU. Maybe more consistancy, better 0.1% and 1% lows, with newer big games. 6 cores / 6 threads could be a limiting factor nowadays. 

If you really want to upgrade your CPU within your plateform, i'd go with the 9900k. But even used, this CPU is ridicously expensive vs. performance, because of that "i9" name. (Cause I can't see any other reasons why tbh) 
And a 120/140mm AIO like you have right now isn't gonna keep up with such CPU. 
I don't think it's worth it. 

Personnally i'd hold back, stack some money to have a new complete new plateform, along with a new cooler. And then upgrade the GPU down the line. A new PSU might be required tho, depending of your choices. 

[Tetras]

If a game is CPU bottlenecked by your i5-8400, then it's probably going to be GPU bottlenecked with a 1080. In other words: I wouldn't bother.

 

It held up pretty well in this video, better than I expected:

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

15 minutes ago, Akatsuki198 said:

From a calculator and also looking into just similar setups to see the performance vs other cpus

Calculators aren't reliable. UserBenchmark can be used to compare performance, but those results are often skewed towards higher performance as a baseline because so many people overclock.

 

An 8600K would only give you a minor frequency increase and overclocking support, it wouldn't be good for much beyond that. If you really wanted to upgrade, I'd look at an i7-8700K.

 

In any case, you're not losing enough performance that it makes a ton of sense to only upgrade one part. An 8700K would certainly mitigate the bottleneck, but you likely won't notice the difference much, if at all(depending on your use cases). I'd suggest holding off on the upgrade, saving up some more money, and doing a full system overhaul in a year or two, possibly a jump to 13th or 14th gen instead of a minor increase on 8th or 9th gen.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

1 hour ago, Akatsuki198 said:

So I was looking into my system and learned that my 1080 is bottlenecked by my 8400, i wanna save money and I was wondering if it'd be worth switching to an 8600k and overclocking it to about 4.9-5ghz so I can just pop in another cpu or if I should just save up and go for a new mobo and a 11600k

System Specs

I5 8400

Gigabyte Aorus z370 Gaming 7

Corsair 120mm aio

Corsair Vengeance 4x8gb 3200mhz

EVGA 1080 SC Black

1tb 980 pro (ik it's overkill for my gen mobo but it was on sale lol)

Thermaltake 750w psu

Ok that board looks sick

Why the hell arent new boards like this

 

Anyways an 8600k is a dumb upgrade choice unless you get one for <50$ same goes for an 8700k or 9900k at the prices you usually find them at

 

Resell the mobo + cpu and look for used ryzen since a used 3600(x) is around 50-60$ and a used 5600(x) is around 80-100$ which will outperform an 8700k while being cheaper, drawing less power, and having an upgrade path to a 5800x3d or 5950x which can be found used for some pretty decent prices

[Akatsuki198]

2 hours ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Ok that board looks sick

Why the hell arent new boards like this

 

Anyways an 8600k is a dumb upgrade choice unless you get one for <50$ same goes for an 8700k or 9900k at the prices you usually find them at

 

Resell the mobo + cpu and look for used ryzen since a used 3600(x) is around 50-60$ and a used 5600(x) is around 80-100$ which will outperform an 8700k while being cheaper, drawing less power, and having an upgrade path to a 5800x3d or 5950x which can be found used for some pretty decent prices

Definitely something I'll look into, won't sell the cpu mobo though since I'm planning on passing it down to my girl for her first pc but I will definitely look into the amd stuff, will it also perform well with other task like video/photo editing, graphic design and rendering etc?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

22 minutes ago, Akatsuki198 said:

Definitely something I'll look into, won't sell the cpu mobo though since I'm planning on passing it down to my girl for her first pc but I will definitely look into the amd stuff, will it also perform well with other task like video/photo editing, graphic design and rendering etc?

Should do fine for those