Highend Build CPU Upgrade

[mozi64]

Hello there, this is my first thread/post here.

I was hoping you guys could give me some advice on whether or not I should upgrade my build.

So this is my current rig:

 

ASRock Z97 Extreme9

4790k @ 4,7Ghz

4x4GB DDR3 1600

2xGTX1080 (AMP Extreme) with HB Bridge

WQHD 144Hz Monitor (ROG PG278Q)

 

So my target is to build a highend rig to Play (almost all) games at 144fps to get the Maximum out of my Monitor but in some games (Crysis 3, BF1 etc.) my fps drop to 100 and lower.

In Crysis 3 I even dropped to 57 in a certain Scene, as my CPU went to 100% usage.

As I'm going for a highend rig, the DDR3 also Kind of annoys me in this build.

 

The release of Kaby Lake was Kind of underwhelming.

I didn't upgrade to Skylake as the gains were minimal, but now even Kaby Lake isn't that impressive.

Now Ryzen is coming, but I honestly don't think it will outperform Kaby Lake.

 

So if you had the Money to spend, would you upgrade to Kaby Lake with DDR4? (I'd buy a Z270, 7700k and 4x16GB of fast DDR4 Ram)

Or wait for Ryzen / another year or 2 for cannon lake?

 

Thank you very much!

 

[Mr.Meerkat]

Well for sure it's your CPU that's bottlenecking your dual 1080s especially as you're trying to get 144fps for your 144Hz monitor so the best plan of action would be to either wait for Zen or maybe Skylake-E  

[Gonio]

Doubt a upgrade is worth it. The 4790 can come along just fine in general. In general would say that the swap for decent DDR3 to 4 is not worth it. Could try to OC the RAM, but can be tricky to keep it stable sometimes. And it all depends on what game and settings.

 

Honestly your problems could also be related to SLI causing framtime drops that lead to the CPU spiking. So in other words the high CPU usage could be the result of a different cause. Also fps is never stable and your demands are still searching the limit. Best might be to play with videosettings if you want that 144Hz, but otherwise if you can stay above 100Hz you already have big noteworthy gain. Graphics is not on a lvl yet where that demand can be run maxed out without a issue, and since multi GPU is far from perfect, you can get a less smooth performance because of the framtimes even if you get more fps.

 

But you mention BF1. In multiplayer it is demanding. If you don't already play on DX11 go to it. More fps already then on DX12. Otherwise slightly tune videosettings as mentioned.

[mozi64]

15 minutes ago, Gonio said:

Doubt a upgrade is worth it. The 4790 can come along just fine in general. In general would say that the swap for decent DDR3 to 4 is not worth it. Could try to OC the RAM, but can be tricky to keep it stable sometimes. And it all depends on what game and settings.

 

Honestly your problems could also be related to SLI causing framtime drops that lead to the CPU spiking. So in other words the high CPU usage could be the result of a different cause. Also fps is never stable and your demands are still searching the limit. Best might be to play with videosettings if you want that 144Hz, but otherwise if you can stay above 100Hz you already have big noteworthy gain. Graphics is not on a lvl yet where that demand can be run maxed out without a issue, and since multi GPU is far from perfect, you can get a less smooth performance because of the framtimes even if you get more fps.

 

But you mention BF1. In multiplayer it is demanding. If you don't already play on DX11 go to it. More fps already then on DX12. Otherwise slightly tune videosettings as mentioned.

Thank you for your opinion.
I play BF1 on DX11 and it's decently smooth in MP but I've seen drops down to 90 FPS.

I play with everything maxed out and 110% supersampling but the usage/load on the 1080s was always under 85% while the CPU usage is at 70-80% on average, so I suspected at least some kind of cpu bottleneck.

Maybe this really is caused by the SLI.

 

[Gonio]

Well it seems you should also try to fix stuff with slightly adjusting certain videosettings in BF1. Drops are often caused with a sudden 'overload' of things happening, like explosions, sudden large ammounts of movement when turning around a wall from players etc.

 

But I don't play it myself, so should ask around here on the forum. I know there have been many people with similar issues like you had, and check what settings they changed for improvements. Or maybe they just accepted an bit lower average fps. Big drops sucks, but if average is still around 100 it already is a nice gain. Games like this push hardware still to the limit. So maybe next gen or 2 further you can run it easily at max fps/Hz combination.

[faziten]

High FPS require high overclocks. No matter if you buy a 6700K 7700K, 6900K, etc. You need strong single core and strong multicore performance. 

The simplest way of doing so is buying the best mainstream CPU today it's the 7700K a nice watercooling, and 5.0Ghz OC. Will you get 144 locked? Probably not, 2x1080 can push a ton of frames where shadows, physics and A.I calcs have to be made on the CPU. It has a huge overhead (except in crappy engines like CoD/Titanfall where the frame latency is prioritized over image quality). and will probably won't be as consistent. 

 

There's a youtube channel called Bang4BuckPCGamer, he recently uprgaded to 2x1080 in a x99 5960X @4.5Ghz and upload benchmarks every day. From there you can get an idea what kind of performance x99 would offer (which is also zen-level of performance if we take into account the official comparison against 6900K). 

 

Bang4buckPCGamer channel

 

Spoiler: Crysis 3 1440p with 2xsmaa ran at about 120-130FPS on Welcome to the jungle map (which is the most abusive map CPU wise). 

His specks are: 5960x 4.5Ghz, 1080 sli @ 2Ghz (HBB)... etc. Probably skylake-E could bring a few more fps since skylake has a more optimized way of communication between GPU-CPU.

[mozi64]

12 hours ago, faziten said:

High FPS require high overclocks. No matter if you buy a 6700K 7700K, 6900K, etc. You need strong single core and strong multicore performance. 

The simplest way of doing so is buying the best mainstream CPU today it's the 7700K a nice watercooling, and 5.0Ghz OC. Will you get 144 locked? Probably not, 2x1080 can push a ton of frames where shadows, physics and A.I calcs have to be made on the CPU. It has a huge overhead (except in crappy engines like CoD/Titanfall where the frame latency is prioritized over image quality). and will probably won't be as consistent. 

 

There's a youtube channel called Bang4BuckPCGamer, he recently uprgaded to 2x1080 in a x99 5960X @4.5Ghz and upload benchmarks every day. From there you can get an idea what kind of performance x99 would offer (which is also zen-level of performance if we take into account the official comparison against 6900K). 

 

Bang4buckPCGamer channel

 

Spoiler: Crysis 3 1440p with 2xsmaa ran at about 120-130FPS on Welcome to the jungle map (which is the most abusive map CPU wise). 

His specks are: 5960x 4.5Ghz, 1080 sli @ 2Ghz (HBB)... etc. Probably skylake-E could bring a few more fps since skylake has a more optimized way of communication between GPU-CPU.

Thank you, I will check his channel out! I think my mentioned <60 fps drop actually was on that map. Generally I reach over 100 fps in Crysis with 2 x smaa, even over 160 in certain parts.

You guys helped a lot. It's tempting, but I will hold back on upgrading for a while at least. Let's see what the Ryzen Benchmarks will say in a month.

Maybe Intel will leak more info on Skylake-X until then and convince me on waiting until August.